The Masters in Education Technology program at York College of Pennsylvania culminates in either an action research or professional development project. For my project, I have chosen action research. Over the course of my studies, I have learned how to use a variety of educational web applications to enhance student learning. As a teacher, I have first hand experience with students utilizing these tools and my students have taught me which are most beneficial to their learning. For my action project, I am adding one more element to using educational technology in my classroom and that is student choice.
In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the benefits of student choice, also called personalized learning. This practice includes providing students with options when it comes to meeting their learning goals. One popular example of personalized learning is the use of choice boards (Smith, 2017). Principals, like mine at Steelton-Highspire Jr/Sr High School, are even using choice boards for teacher professional development. My action research project seeks to prove that the inclusion of educational technology formats, such as EdPuzzle, Canva, and WebQuest, in interactive personalized learning methods increases both student choice and engagement in how they learn.
The first step to beginning this project is collecting informed consent documents from both my students and their parents. Initially, I planned to do this by sending letters home with students during the first week of school. Due to the current pandemic, my school is opening in a virtual manner only, no face-to-face. I was worried that my project would be slowed down right away by this. Would I have to mail letters to all my students’ parents? Would it be okay to use a Google Form to collect signatures? Are my students even going to log into their Google Classrooms? How am I going to get this required consent?
As soon as I found out that I could use Google Forms to gather consent, my worry subsided.
Using the parent email addresses listed in the student information system, I composed my “Welcome Back” newsletter that includes the Form, an image of the original letter, and a Google Slides presentation on my project. The tool used to send this newsletter is Mailchimp.
I like the data Mailchimp provides, especially the ability to see who has opened the newsletter. I might still need to send some letters home using the US Postal Service, but that should be minimal. Hopefully through the use of my newsletter followed up with virtual class meetings with my students I will receive enough consent forms to have a large enough population for both test and control groups.
The past two weeks have primarily been spent preparing for virtual teaching. My project goal for this time period was to prepare and send my parent consent forms and to compose this first reflection. Before concluding, I want to share an article that has been very helpful to me while I prepare: (https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/9-ways-online-teaching/.) This is from the website Cult of Pedagogy and written by educational coach Jennifer Gonzalez. I have found additional support in the Mindshift newsletter published by KQED (https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/.)
Sources:
Erin Wing (13 June 2015). Classroom Newsletters and MailChimp. Erin Wing. Retrieved from http://www.erinwing.com/mailchimp-newsletters/
Smith, Julie. (October 7 2017). 5 Reasons to use digital choice boards in the classroom.
The Techie Teacher®. Retrieved from https://www.thetechieteacher.net/2017/10 /5-reasons-to-use-digital-choice-boards.html