Week 1, Action Research -- Back to the Beginning

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’ve been getting so much done. Created two new media projects for my AR second cycle. [See one of them above.] And found a medium that I felt I had been looking for. It wasn’t PERFECT, but it would do. I started to put the pieces that I had made together.

I knew that I HAD to get the second cycle actually going, but it seemed that the more I worked on it, the more barriers sprang up between me and what I had in mind to create. Perhaps I needed to review what I wanted to do and look outside of the box again.

So back to the beginning I went. What were my motivations? What was I truly trying to do? In going over all of the requirements on the checklist, I recognized that I had not analyzed the data that I had gathered on my second cycle as thoroughly as I should. I created three more spreadsheets of data and created three more charts, analyzing what technology art teachers who completed my original survey were actually using in their classes, what they said they wanted to be using and, finally, what they had actually used from the website that was currently up. Here are the three charts showing this data.

 Above: Technology Currently Used by Art Teachers Responding to Survey

Above: Items on Current Site Used by Respondents

Basically, the 33 art teachers who responded who currently use the site use very little technology in their ceramics classroom, but want to use quite a bit more. Primarily of interest to these teachers are:

·      using online student art galleries

·      using online art games and activities

·      student-created videos

Teachers were also interested in the various ways that students might communicate with each other such as social networks, blogging, discussion boards and wikis.

My Question

Can I put together something that will help these teachers effectively incorporate more of these elements into their classes?

We will see. I spent these several days putting together a multiple page blog on Blogger and turning it into a kind of content management system – a container for all of the information and media that a teacher might need to teach a unit or lesson in ceramics, with lesson plans, handouts, videos, and advice for incorporating some of the technology into the classroom. 

Then my Internet went down. Sunday evening from about 8:30- almost 11:00. It's 11:00 now and I'm back on. Continue . . .