Meeting with mentor

After meeting with one of my mentors this week, the only thing that I am going to change right now is that I will not have students do an online journal. Instead I will continue having them do "quizzes" on moodle and then I will compare results of that with a similar paper and pencil assignment. She also suggested that I might want to try starting a "Homework Help" forum on the class moodle page and see how that worked. Not only could I help them, but other students could read and post as well.

EDLD 5301 - Action Research Plan

Action Planning Template
Goal: My action research project is to determine if the online learning tool Moodle is effective in student learning in our Algebra II PreAP course. So questions I will study are: 1)     Are the Moodle quizzes having a positive effect on class averages? 2)     Do students feel this is an effective way for them to learn or process information? 3)     Do students feel that these questions being online instead of on paper & pencil is better? 4)     What else would students prefer to do online rather than traditional methods?
Action Steps(s):	Person(s) Responsible:	Timeline: Start/End	Needed Resources	Evaluation
Do a box plot of grades of students in the class two years ago and compare it to a box plot of grades of the students in the current class.	Self	Now – 11/12/2010	1) Calculator 2) Grades from 2 classes in the 08-09 school year (1st nine wks) 3) Grades from 2 classes in the current school year. (1st nine wks)	Evaluate the difference in the grades at the first nine weeks.
Have students complete a math journal assignment solely on Moodle and compare it to paper & pencil journal grades.	Self Students	Now – 5/2011	1) An online Journal assignment. 2) Grades for both the online journal & the previous paper & pencil journal.	Evaluate the difference in the grades.
After student complete their online math journal assignment, have them complete a survey about the pros and cons of online versus paper and pencil journals.	Self Students	Now – 5/2010	1) A Google Doc form for students to fill out. 2) Questions for the form.	Determine what the majority of students surveyed felt the pros and cons of the online versus paper and pencil were.
Have students complete a survey about the effectiveness of Moodle to learn or process information.	Self Students	Now – 5/2011	1) A Google Doc form for students to fill out. 2) Questions for the form.	Determine what the majority of students surveyed felt about Moodle in their Algebra 2 class.
Have students complete a survey about what other types of assignments would be helpful or preferable to have online.	Self Students	Now – 5/2011	1) A Google Doc form for students to fill out. 2) Questions for the form.	Determine what types of assignments  the majority of students surveyed would like to see online.

EDLD 5301 - Reflections Week 2

So far this week, the most important thing that I have learned is that action research has to be practical. It must be relevant to the researcher in order to have an impact on student learning. If the research is done just for the sake of research, it will most likely not have an impact on the researcher or the students. It is important to choose something that can help you personally with your teaching, your school or your district.

How can educational leaders use blogs?

Educational leaders can use blogs like everyone else uses them; the only difference is that other people are looking to them for their reflections and leadership on how to do things. Dana states that a blog can be a powerful collection tool, but can also be shared with students or teachers or the world for that matter. Ironically, it is often “difficult for the novice principal-researcher to view their own reflections as important data!” (Dana, 2009). I can understand this and there is the extra pressure that principals are looked at as the models to both teachers and students in the school. But if they can get past this, a blog is a great way to put ideas out and get comments back from a variety of sources. Educators in the same district or school can comment, but even better, educators from other places can comment and this will be valuable for someone who is conducting an inquiry.

What is action research & how can I use it?

When I first saw that the week 1 assignment was about administrative inquiry or action research, I thought two things. The first question was what is action research anyway? The other thought was that I was in over my head in this program. Now I know the basics about action research. It is a type of research done by actual practitioners like teachers or principals. They determine a situation that needs improvement, usually something regarding student achievement. Then they move through researching the problem in the course of their everyday activities. They also reflect on the problem in multiple ways. Then they determine what the solution will be and implement it. Action research is “a systematic approach to improvement based on the process of inquiry and use of diagnostic data from multiple sources.” (Harris, 2010) The reason this type of inquiry or research is so valuable is that it is not done by people who are no longer in a school environment or have never been there. It is done by people who are actually in schools every day. My school has been very big on talking about Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) for a few years, but I never really understood exactly what they meant by it. Now I know that it is just a “small group of faculty members who meet regularly to discuss more effective learning and teaching practices.” (Dana, 2009) This would be exactly what we have been doing in my department by not only meeting about what we are doing in the classroom, but sharing ideas and experiences to make our teaching more effective. In this way, teachers are learning from each other at these meetings instead of just talking about what they are going to do each day in class. I think this could be used in my teaching career by finding a student achievement problem and coming up with an action research plan to investigate it. In that way I would be using my own experiences each day as I investigate the issue and have my students and colleagues help me discover the answers. I think I would use it to study the effectiveness of a particular strategy or implementation of a certain technology. As far as the other question, yes I still think I might be over my head sometimes, but I am forging onward, hoping to learn something along the way!