Saturday, February 4, 2012

Overview


Our students have changed with respect to how they receive instruction.  The days of pencils and paper in the classroom will soon be obsolete.  Our kids, especially on the elementary level, are now digital learners.  They will no longer be engaged with handouts and overheads.  We as educators must then move into this digital world with them in order to provide the quality instruction they will need to succeed. 
  My action research project will examine the impact of integrated technology in the classroom on student engagement and learning.  The contextual setting of my research will be one of the Title 1 schools in which I currently work.  I believe it will be a good arena for this research because of its diverse ethnicity, economic miscellany and varied scholastic level students. 
After consulting with my site supervisor, my target population will be the third grade students at my campus.  I feel that the third grade is a big transitional year for students as they are moving from what I call repetitive based learning, meaning that they learn a basic concept and drill on that concept in order to get a foundation, to higher order thinking education, where they will have to develop original ideas and thought.  
The size of this class of students will be large enough to provide a representative sample of students throughout our district and still be logistically manageable for assessment, data collection and analysis. 
My research will be conducted via both formal and informal methods. Primary of course will be a literature review to educate myself on any previous studies in this area.   I also plan on using surveys of both students and teachers, interviews, observation, actual modeling of integrated technology and assessments to obtain solid data for analysis and review. 
The significance of this research project will help our campus as well as our district to align the use of technology with curriculum to better engage our new and future digital students thus improving the overall learning culture of our schools.  It will help us to become 21st century teachers!

1 comment:

  1. Technology is the way to go. I know there is a couple of our classmates also conducting research on how technology impacts current and future instruction. Can't wait to see how your research is similar and different. At my campus, we are not there yet. I feel that if we (teachers) get the technology we should also get the training so that we can implement it correctly. Technology is our future; who knows in a couple of years teachers may even be replaced by it.

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