Technology research: Good for Education and Retention

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:

Total :	110
Gender:	Males 57	Female 53
Ethnicity	African American 80	White 1	Hispanic 29

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 21^st 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: Houghton Mifflin

Company, (original Cambridge: The Riverside Press).