My research project

Finding a research topic wasn´t easy for me because I didn´t know what I wanted to do or which direction I should take during my investigation. With the help of the IT 3 though I found a field of research that drew my attention: ICT tools.

At first I only wanted to find out which ICT tool is best to use for teaching but I soon found out that this question might be a bit too broad and needed to be specified.

After several talks with different people, including my professor who will be monitoring my master thesis, I confined the field of research to the following question:

• “Which ICT tool can easily be implemented in the ESL/ELE classroom with focus on enhancing the students’ skills in language and media competence?“

On the left you can see my first mindmap that I made trying to find my research topic. I used mindmeister.com to create the map. It might be ugly but it helped me a lot at the beginning.

In my survey I asked the teachers whether they had or had not heard of specific ICT tools, whether they had used them in class already and whether they considered them to be helpful. Quite a few of my chosen tools were unknown to most of the teachers.

You can see the survey here: https://forms.gle/5itUbjFnExmThWRo8

On the left there is a part of my survey displaying a part of the diagram for the question mentioned above. It is in German because I sent it out in German to raise the answer rate.

After finishing the survey I decided to try out producing a short film as my final product. I realized after finishing it how much we should appreciate a good movie that we see because it was a lot of work.

You first have to come up with ideas and write a script or at least note the scenes you want to show. You have to build the requisites and other things, in my case I bought playmobil that my little daughter can now use afterwards.

Then you have to either take photos or shot little video sequences or both with your camera, to then produce your video sequencing the raw material and adding music, extra pictures with text elements, captions and emoticons.

I used the app Clips for that whole process.

On the left: My short film "How a survey saved the day"