Research for teachers; Week 5 reflection

Action research has become the beginning of an interesting journey in the education. We as educators we need to keep improving, we cannot stop improving and learning the new techniques, technologies that would make our students successful in the future.  EDLD_5301 / Action Research has given the key to find opportunity areas in our classroom, school, district that way when we see something that needs improving, something that is bugging a group of people. We could make things easier, efficiently, simple, smoothly, etc that would benefit a lot of people.

I choose during my course to work with what I know best: a) bilingual b) technology and with this approach try to have a project that would help increase the use of technology in classrooms benefiting the bilingual students. The bilingual population has been increasing in as mentioned by Mark Hugo Lopez , in his report titled U.S. Hispanic country of origin counts for nation, he mentions that as per the 2010 Decennial Census there is 50.5 million Hispanics in the U.S. so what a better way to use my two strengths trying to benefit this growing population be more successful in their reading tests and try also to help the school and district in increase the grades in the TAKS test that were affected this year.

When I included this topic in the discussion, it was great to know that there are other colleagues that are looking for the same area and have some similar projects, the enrichment from the discussion I believe will reflect in a more solid and better project.

The report, "U.S. Hispanic Country-of-Origin Counts for Nation, Top 30 Metropolitan Areas," authored by Mark Hugo Lopez, Associate Director, Pew Hispanic Center and Daniel Dockterman, Research Assistant, Pew Hispanic Center, is available at the Pew Hispanic Center's website, www.pewhispanic.org.

Research for teachers; Week 4 reflection

Well I can’t believe we are just starting our final week on the program. Time it really flies. This week has been a challenge, due to some changes at my school my site supervisor has changed. Unfortunately I have not heard any one taking her place yet, because of that I have not been able to complete this week’s assignment as I would have liked to do it, by meeting with my site supervisor. Instead what I’ve been doing is preparing everything I could think of, to present it to my future site supervisor whenever he or she arrives.

In other aspect of this week, I think I’ve mentioned before, but the idea of this action research it still look similar to other quality improvement strategies used in the manufacturing business, but adapted for school environment. The strategy that made me think of that similarity it’s the force field analysis.

I’m looking forward to see if that is really a similarity or it was just an sole idea.

Research for teachers; Week 3 reflection

Topic: Accelerated Reading

After discussing this week with my site mentor we find a question: How can technology benefit readiness in classroom?
We will take the scores from the last two years and take a hole 2nd grade class, provide them with technological software, that will focus in reading and reading comprehension. The technological resources also include syllables, word recognition, fluency and reading comprehension.

Our school is also a title 1 classroom with 100% low income students and 52% of them are Hispanic. This year there was a grant for reading and the goals were not achieved properly, this was also reflected in TAKS scores who were affected also by this situation.

Below you could find my action research template any suggestions on ways to improve it will be appreciated:


Research Project for Lamar Masters

Thank you.

Research for teachers; Week 2 reflection

This week I really enjoyed the videos, especially the ones from Johnny Briseno and Dr. Kirk Lewis. Personally I always think there is room for improvement in every school, either dismissing students could be a problem, either there are a lot of time loss during instruction or there is a lot of full lines in the cafeteria causing misbehavior during the waiting period.

Being said this, our research and or improvement needs to be consistent with our needs and goals. If I'm planning to improve something some questions that need to arise are: how many people are affected? What tools do we have to improve it? Is it worth the time, money, resources, etc. spending? Maybe the issue or problem is not that big, or turns out that there is a bigger issue somewhere else, affecting more people (students, administrators, parents, etc.) That doing a project on it would benefit more.

Also doing brainstorms with some of the affected people would be beneficial for a project, we could end getting a simple solution to a big problem and it was just never put into test.

Research for teachers; Week 1 what I've learned about active research.

It is interesting how, we were analyzing some information in school as a team, collaborating each other and brainstorming in ways of how to maximize the instruction time for next year. We were discussing of the time spent in bathroom breaks, lining up, every single transition time we could come by. This is what active research is for, looking for a problem, brainstorming possible solutions in a team environment.

In this competitive world it makes sense that school start analyzing their TAKS scores, benchmarks, curriculum, in order to find opportunity areas, the principal as the captain of the boat, could use active research to improve professional development and making more valuable for the staff attending it, shared of best practices among staff and develop more collaboration among all personnel.

Coming from a manufacturing environment as my previous job. This looks like and informal way for teachers to implement changes, in order to improve a task, or by establishing goals during a period of time. I believe schools will star looking in the manufacture area or other industries for more formal established quality improvement processes. With topis like six sigma, creative problem solving,

Transforming american education.

Education among the nations is key for their success among other economies. The United States under the Obama administration it seems that it has focused on two goals:

•We will raise the proportion of college graduates from where it now stands [39%] so that 60% of our population holds a 2-year or 4-year degree.
• We will close the achievement gap so that all students – regardless of race, income, or neighborhood – graduate from high school ready to succeed in college and careers.
(http://www.ed.gov/sites/default/files/NETP-2010-final-report.pdf page V)

The plan uses continue improvement plan to make education more productive. It is looking to transform education based on technology infrastructure, learning resources, to lead the education to the 21st century and beyond.

It is interesting how these goals were established, These looks pretty aggressive goals, in times where there is budget cuts and where populations have changed. I see these college graduates so low, because a big part of the population can not simply get into college, because they are illegal citizens. That population has increased as they are looking for the American dream.

Another fact is the budget crisis that has been happening over the past days, if the Obama administration don't prioritize education in this budget crisis as a lead for reducing their debt in the future, students would have a hard time graduating from collegue.

Spring Branch ISD Technology plan

 The Spring Branch ISD technology plan is a well detailed plan. It shows the pre-analysis they did in order to understand where the district was at in terms of technology. The district noticed some of their laptops were old and had different versions of the operating systems on them, they setup a target on proving teachers new equipment with the same operating system among them, in order to standardize.

They set up some goals, strategies and objectives in short, middle and long term to fulfill the term of 3 years for this technology plan. One of the things I noticed is the technology needs are focused in 4 different sections (Teaching and learning, educator preparation development, leadership, administration and support services, infrastructure for technology) aligned to STaR.

As Activ-classrooms are getting to the schools the need of improving the infrastructure, for providing a stable internet service, they are increasing it's bandwidth to support these new equipment as well as (VoIP among the district, Web 2.0technologies, Smart boards,etc). Due to all of these changes training and staff development is a need to integrate it to classroom. They will include staff development that is also aligned to SBEC.

I noticed it also mentions different types of evaluations some on going, in order to examine the districts success in the new implementations. Such as STaR results, Annual surveys, informal staff interviews, technology rich lesson plans, etc.

After reading their plan I can imagine where the district is heading and with clear vision, budget allocated, resources, etc.

Regards
Eduardo A.



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Spring Branch ISD technology plan 2008-2011. Plan last edited 3/30/2008. retrieved 4/24/2011
Source http://www.springbranchisd.com/admin/ts/techplan/techplan0811.htm

Technology Assesments

Texas has committed to put technology in classrooms. Whenever you are implementing something you need to have a way to measure it and in this case, this will be STaR. Districts should know how their teachers are in terms of proficiency with the tools available. A way to do this is by providing a small question survey at the beginning of the year. I think its also important to have the survey be anonymous, this way teachers will feel more comfortable in responding it, leading to a better accuracy on the results.

I believe this survey should be based on basic technology skills as well as getting deep in specific details of the technology resources available. Once the results come the technology department, could focus on staff development on the areas where its needed, always focusing on how teachers will implement it in the classrooms? How to enrich students learning based in technology?

During that training period, staff should be able to get involved in technology, test the tools, play a little with them, at the end. Is how they will be proficient in the new skills, at the end of each staff development, including a small survey based on the skills learned. If for any reason there is no enough equipment for them to test it on that day, the survey could take place a week after. This way if teachers still have questions, the technology department could reinforce what was taught, either with and additional training, or in an email, web page, FAQ's questions sent, etc.



Regards
Eduardo

Webconference 4/20/2011

Hello again .!!

Yesterday, I had a conference online as part of my master. The conference reminded me when I used to work for a technology company. As part of my role I had to have a lot of web conferences, you met people from our the world (India, Argentina, US, etc). It was exciting as a fact!!  You were able to make new relationships just with the use of the technology.

There are different ways to have a web conference, some people use Skype, other use net meeting or like yesterday we use Adobe. The idea stills the same, but these still have a room for improvement. I wonder how many years would it take to have a 3D conference like in the movie star wars? even when some conferences today had some connectivity problems.

These technology has a lot of benefits, makes a company save a lot of money in travel expenses, or can help a family feel closer. I remember last Christmas we had a Skype video conference with my family in Mexico, even when we were not able to be there in person we still were able to view the Christmas presents exchange through this technology.

I'm thinking when is technology going to change our lives again?

Until next time
Eduardo A.

Hello to this blog!!

Hello world,

I remember when Facebook, Twitter, wikipedia and all these new technologies came out. I was kind of reluctant to be a part of that world... publishing my ideas, my thoughts... kind of making my private life, public. I really thought I could stay away from them until it has become part of my masters.  I'm not sure yet if I like this idea of getting my ideas public or not.

If you write an email, you at least know who are you writing it to, pretty different than having something on the web where almost everyone can see it. Yes, I know that some of you might say "well check your settings and use the highest security possible". The thing is that one you put it on the web, its visible to almost everyone. Your co-workers, known people, colleges, bosses or future bosses, etc.

Being said that I hope this tool, really works for a good purpose. My intentions with this blog are:
 1)Continue my preparation in my masters. 2) Build a tool that will help the sharing for best practices in teachers (websites, tools, tips, etc).


Thank you
Eduardo A.