Technology
research: Good for Education and Retention
In the new age of information in the 21st century student must
be able to use technology to improve every facet of their lives. They use
technology to entertain them selves and they might as well us technology to
improve their educational lives. I believe that technology can help improve
student retention and teacher success rate with students. I have heard
statement like technology makes our lives better so I decided that I should put
that theory to proof. I noticed that in my class the students enjoyed lesson
more when technology was involved in the process and they seemed to retain more
based on that fact. The demographic of the action results are:
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Total :
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110
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Gender:
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Males
57
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Female
53
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Ethnicity
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African American
80
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White
1
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Hispanic
29
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I envision that technology will help our kids retain a lot
of the information that would be lost by the old lecture style. I believe that
our student will achieve some moderate grow in my of the category of scope but
will greatly improve scores on major categories in social studies on c-scope. I
believe that our student will have a gain a 6 % increase in social studies. I
expect our g/t kids to improve by more that 6% do to the fact that they have
all the resources available to them. This will be gaged by looking at the
results from the beginning of the years and now.
We know that engagement and personal motivation combine to
create meaningful learning environments (Dadds and Hart, 2001) and a genuine
interest indicates personal
identification with a course of action (Dewey, 1913). I know
that there is bases for what technology can do for our student in the new 21st
century. I seem to always get my student attention when I use technology to
garner their attention. Student today get bored with simple lecture and
question series. There is no denying the penetration of media into children's
lives, while school activities and assignments lag behind in incorporating
digital resources and teaching digital literacy (Carey, 2006). I read a quote
from Thomas Edison that said he made a statement of “movies will soon replace
education”. I don’t think he was right but he was on the right track because
technology can be a boost to education. I used my students in my classes to
help conduct my research for my action research. I choose to alternate my
lessons with technology by doing one lesson with technology and then doing the
next with lecture, worksheets, and questioning. I also did this strategy with
my AP student, LEP, SPED, and ESL students.
My world geography team and I used a differentiate strategy
together because we have always been a team on all issue. I personally put out
a pitch to then that I would need some help from them in order to have a really
good action research and they all agreed that they would be very diligent in
the process of collecting data. We all put out a letter stating that we would
do action research on the kids with the permission of the parents. Most of my
football parents agreed that this process would be very effortless for them and
would embarrass their child. I organized my students with their very own
teachers so that nothing would be new for them. This would be just a normal
walk in the park because they wouldn’t even recognize the strategy taking place
in their class. We designed the PowerPoint presentation as a group but I main
took the extra effort to included more than just written words. I hyperlinked
the lessons with other technology such as video, music, and clips so that the student
would know what was coming just interaction. I during our regular planning
session I would collect all the information and materials. We would meet
several times a week to discuss lesson and the facts. Planning sessions never
took more than 10 minutes extra outside of our normal meeting times. My action
research plan will help out a lot of students in my school community because
our kids all like to be entertained and learn at the same time. Our students
will improve on retention of material taught because they wont be just sitting
their and watch the teacher lecture. They will be engaged and actively taught
social studies through technology and innovation. I think this approach will
help with all other educational groups such as Sped, ESL ,
ELL, and economically disadvantage students.
Work Citied
Carey, K. (2006).
Fame at an Early Age. Montessori
Life, 18(2), 6-11.
Dadds, M. & Hart, S. (2001). Doing Practitioner Research
Differently. London ,
Routledge Falmer.
Dewey, J. (1913).
Interests and Effort in Education. Boston , MA
Company, (original Cambridge :
The Riverside Press).
