Action Research Plan

GOAL:  The goal of my action research project is to incorporate portable computing devices (or PCD) into the everyday task of teaching and learning within a high school classroom. By doing this I want to increase student engagement and in turn increase the learning and understanding of the content.

Showing the school and district that the these devices can be beneficial tools and not just toys is a necessary extension of this project in order to get the rules that ban these devices modified to some extent.

OUTCOMES	ACTIVITIES	RESOURCES/ RESEARCH TOOLS NEEDED	PERSON RESPONSIBLE	TIME LINE	Benchmarks/ ASSESSMENT
Increase knowledge of available applications for PCD’s	Review of literature, Web search	Myself, My facilitator, internet access, (possibly librarian)	Myself	February – March 2012
Understand the availability of PCD’s within my classroom and school	Survey students to see what PCD’s they have and that they bring to school	Myself, Students	Myself	February – March 2012
Use PCD’s in classroom setting in order to test its usability – tweak as needed to get final workable lesson	Create lesson plan(s) that mirror current lessons but use PCD’s	Myself	Myself	April – August 2012	Compare and contrast lesson with previous knowledge of lesson before PCD
Use PCD’s as a central learning tool in the classroom to improve student engagement and learning	Use the lessons created in previous step – Give district unit assessments along with teacher created assessments and surveys to gauge understanding and engagement	Myself	Myself	August – December 2012	Use common assessments, both formal and informal, from previous years and compare the data with previous years.
Disseminate knowledge	Present information to campus administration and if needed to campus staff	M. Tomberlin	M. Tomberlin	January – February 2013

Educational Leadership and Blogging

A blog is like a journal.  It allows school administrators to write down daily reflections and thoughts.  The blog puts the entries into a chronological order and lets the administrator or other accepted individuals search the entries by date or keyword. This powerful tool allows users to revisit previous thoughts and improve communication.

Action Research

Action research is a fairly new research methodology that allows an individual or team do further inquiry on essential questions or "wonderings" (Dana, 2010) about their everyday jobs and duties.  The plan lets the practitioner do research on a topic that is relevant to their specific job and their specific needs.  It follows a basic question, implement change, collect and analyze data, reflect on the data and then repeat set-up. So it is more of a cycle of inquiry and implementation with data collection and reflection mixed in rather than a cookbook set of plans.  The advantage of action research over traditional research it is makes the inquirer an integral part of the research process instead of an outside expert simply telling practitioners what to do without an in depth knowledge of the true problem the practitioner truly faces.

While the term action research is new to my vocabulary, its methodology is not.  “… [A]ction research is an extension of ‘good teaching’. In effect, this process validates teachers’ effective practices in the classroom.” (Ringler, 2007) Many teachers perform action research on a small scale everyday as they assess their students and work to create lesson plans that fit the needs of the students sitting in the class now and not present a previously prepared generic PowerPoint given out with a book adoption. From what I now understand about action research, it is merely working to improve an individual’s skill set through a process of inquiry, implementation and reflection and repeating as necessary. The old lather, rinse and repeat routine put to a more formal setting.

Dana, N. (2009). Leading with Passion and Knowledge: The Principal as an Action Researcher. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Ringler, M. (2007). Action Research an Effective Instructional Leadership Skill for Future Public School Leaders AASA Journal of Scholarship and Action, 4(1), 27-37.

Mastering Teachnology through Action Research

Welcome to the Action Research section of my blog.  Here you will find information on the action research plan I am undertaking as part of my M.ED in Technology Education program.