The beginning of my research

The following was written the beginning of September. We were asked to start coming up with ideas of what we wanted to do for our research, in my grad level class. Now I will be honest, I found it a bit wierd to do this, since it was a grade level course, but I am thankful that the research advisor had us do this.

This is where my research got the start and why I am currently focused on blogging in the classroom. This more or less sets up a good amount of background information as to why I am doing it. Any and all comments are welcomed. Original document also attached if that is easier to read.
Download memo1.doc

When it comes to teaching and education, I feel that teaching and using technology is one of the most important things that our students should learn. It seems more and more people see the internet as something to entertain ourselves, when in fact it is a very valuable tool. Not only can it be used to search out information about just about anything, it can also be used to help students with writing, as well as putting their own thoughts together in ways that they never have before. Tools like blogging and podcasting can help students better communicate their thoughts to other people within the world.

School districts are currently pushing for technology to be integrated within the classrooms. They encourage teachers to take in service classes on how to use programs like PowerPoint or how to use an ipod as an instructional tool.

That is from the district wide selection of courses that are offered to teachers from www.mylearningplan.com.

On April 25, 2007 we had a county wide superintendant’s conference day, in which all of the middle school teachers meet up at New Paltz High School for some seminars. In the afternoon there was a speaker talking about how we can integrate the use of blogs and pod casting within the classroom. He was talking about how students could use the blogs to get their ideas together, and to get feedback from other students about their ideas and what they thought. He was speaking about how blogs could be a very good communication tool. He was also speaking out using a podcast in a way that students could use it in a way to inform and even teach other people about a topic that they were learning in school. It was an awesome seminar and I enjoyed sitting there getting ideas of how to bring these new ideas back into my classroom on top of some of the stuff I was already doing and using.

As this school year started, a social studies teacher and a math teacher were talking about having the students use blogs. The social studies teacher wanted to use it to help the kid improve their writing ability on DBQs as well as other forms of essay writing. The math teacher helps intregrate technology in the school and he was thinking about adding student blogs to the student news paper webpage so that students could blog about what student life in Bailey was like anonymously. This was well within the lines of the seminar we had back in April and I was excited to see it in practice so that maybe I could do it.

I have found out that they are not letting the teachers use blogging in the classroom, and that they are against using most other forms of internet content within the classroom. While I’m at work, I cannot access my youtube account to get the videos I use to help show my students some of my scientific points, nor am I allowed to have a myspace account that my students can ask for homework help on. The math teacher I work with needed to get the OK on www.checkmyhomework.info again this year, even though we have been using it for the last two to three years in our school. It seems to me that there is a major discrepancy between the goals that they have for teacher’s professional development and implementing the use of technology in the classrooms.

I feel with all the negative press that things like myspace and youtube have been getting the school district feels it’s more of a liability to use them so they block the ability to use it. I have asked as to why they don’t feel that we should use these technologies, they say that they are worried about the privacy of our students. How are our students going to know how to keep private information to themselves unless we teach them? How are they going to know how to stay safe on the internet unless we show them? How are they going to know that the internet is a pivotal tool in our current society unless we let them know? These are all the questions that I constantly ask, and that I would love to prove to our school and the district that we need to do while we teach in our classrooms.