A Little More Technology in EDLD 5352

Kerstin Allen

EDLD 5352_ANG

Week 5

Campus-supervised Internship activities Reflection:

I went through my list of activities and thankfully, I'm further along than I realized. I decided to color code each activity as done (green), in process or 1/2 way done (hot pink), not done (no color) last April. The color code helped me see how many things I had done and how much more I had to go. I have made much more progress than I think I had realized. I’m excited to complete the internship activities and maybe even add a few more!

Action Research Plan Reflections:

Honestly this has been quite a journey, because my research was totally turned on its head. I had been collecting my data to begin working on my report in May when I discovered that the validity of my data was compromised due to all of the variations between the first administration on STAAR and the 2^nd.  It is imperative in my mind to make my research focus immediately beneficial to the campus that I'm serving. I was able to collect other data and use it for my research. This year I will be moving to a testing great so I looked forward to using and seeing the benefits of my research.

Technology skills gained in this course:

Working with my peers during this course allowed me to gain more knowledge about Web 2.0 tools, but perhaps the most beneficial part was the experience I gained from working with Google Docs. I had heard of the program, but never created docs or used the program. I can see such wonderful benefits of using Google Docs in education. It can allow educators and administrators to work easily from home or school. It makes working collaboratively easier. Upgrades and changes in technology is a common thing in education. Our district is making some upgrades to our technology and some files on our computers were lost. Had we been saving in Google Drive, this may not have happened.  It also just so happens that my principal was talking to me about updating some communication items at our school using Google Docs and Google Calendar. Thanks to this class I feel much comfortable with those programs and look forward to the transition.  I have truly enjoyed this course and feel that when Lamar gets everything corrected and updated in the course it will be incredibly useful for future administrators.

Quince dance?

Found this today after my post. Even uses the term, “Apples to ….”. Quince dance? I think not. Enjoy my friends!

Preliminary STAAR

Apples to Oranges?! Who will save the day????

Well, I’m half way through the Lamar program and things are going well, but they are getting REAL!! LOL, this week I have started gathering my data, reviewing it and I’ve started drafting me Action Research Report. I think I may pull my hair out!

During my progress, I discovered that my original plan to review classroom data and scores from our AEIS report for the last two years was NO BUENO! I decided it wasn’t legit enough. AEIS was providing me with extra information that wasn’t relevant to my project and I felt like I was comparing apples to oranges. Last year was the first year that STAAR was administered. Many of the questions were field questions and there were many changes made for the assessment this year. When I realized these two things I began to panic!!! How was I going to isolate the information I needed from the AEIS report??? How would I determine if our high-yield instructional strategies had worked??? At that moment my angel from intermediate stepped in. My friend Elizabeth, reminded me that while there had been changes to the assessment, the reporting categories where still the same. But how would I determine how our African American students did in each of those categories from the AEIS report, you ask? Well, I wouldn’t but thanks to Elizabeth I learned how to find the information in Edugence! The sun had come out again and this research project seemed possible, THANK YOU JESUS!

The more I work on this project, I have decided that primary teachers at my school need more training on Edugence and we also need the amount of data in Edugence that the intermediate teachers have. I really feel like if we (primary teachers) had the same amount of data at our finger tips we could exercise the use of more data driven instruction with our students.

More to come my friends. Keep an eye out for the information I found during my lit review.

Its Been Awhile

It has been awhile since I’ve blogged, but I’m happy to report that all is going well with my research. The teachers are working harder than ever to attempt to get our STAAR scores up in our sub populations. Have I mentioned that we almost every sub pop represented at our school??? Yea, makes for a hard job. Anyhow, as we move towards the testing season I have started looking at this year’s Walk-though data (which is designed to follow Marazono’s high-yielding instructional strategies) with last year’s WT data. I’m seeing some good things, but I’m still having trouble locating research that is directly related to African American and Hispanic students. Most of the research is qualitative vs. quantitative making it hard to track its progress without using my own opinion or someone else’s estimation. I’m not saying that qualitative is bad, but knowing my audience…qualitative will get me more teacher buy-in. If you have some insight/research please, hook me up!