Week 2: Refelction

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Well I know that I wanted to do research with the use of connecting specific district curriculum with available technology to assist in the wider use of technology by teachers in their everyday instruction. The research would have attempted to measure the confidence and frequency of use of the mentioned technology with teachers who were offered this resources as opposed to teachers that were offered the curriculum and available technology separately and without much guidance as I think is more likely the case in most teaching situations. At least this has been the experience throughout the two districts I have worked in. It seems to be common place when I talk to other educators during conferences as well. I feel this is most important now that teachers have been thrown into technology now with remote learning. Even thought they are using technology to teach their classrooms can become more reminiscent of the lecture based instruction instead of student lead interactive activities that engage students. It was my plan to interview in-service middle school teachers since I have access to those as my position as middle school librarian. I wanted to focus on technologies that can easily integrate with google classroom, those that are offered already by the district in the region that offer students time to create unique products and meet TEKS set by the district curriculum. One technology I wanted to sue was BrainPOP because though many teachers use it to watch videos and quizzes students can also use it to create, save and submit unique projects from original movies to games they code themselves and there is something from every subject available. In this research would focus on teachers that are on a spectrum of unsuccessful at integrating technology. 

I think that through out my courses I have about 50 articles that might fit in to this research specifically I would have to go through it. Most of them are speak in general about integration of technology with education and some deal with different groups of teachers mostly preservice teachers that would not be situation, still I think some aspects would still apply. I will focus to see integration of technology and curriculum with in-service teachers in the K-12 arena because I think there can be a big difference with K-12 and higher education. No one like to push state testing like K-12 public schools and that environment makes it difficult to fell comfortable taking the time to learn and implement technology. The articles that I have accumulated so far as spread in different folders in my Refworks account. I will slowly be moving those out to another resources that will not expire once I leave UNT and using some of the new resources introduced in our meeting I will work on gathering more. 

I do like the idea of the suggestion to study the role of librarians in recommending the purchase or adoption of technologies as well and how they learn about them. I actually have a technology I just got a quote for because of a teacher recommendation. She was turned on to Nearpod by another teacher and we looked at it together. The MTT (Master Technology Teacher) and I put in place two trainings (basic and intermediate) for our teachers we placed a goggle form to try and measure the interest in this and with that we requested a quote and I am going to my principal this week to see about moving our teachers out of the free version. So while I am not ready to make the change in topic yet I will be also looking for articles that might be useful for this topic as well. For me I think I take ideas from research conferences but mostly teachers because I know that if they like it they have already found a practical way to integrate it. Technology trainings for our campus is the responsibility of the MTT and I. We offer trainings once a month. The calendar of training topics is created in part by suggestions of the teachers, items they they would like to learn more about. Being this support at the campus is helpful to have teachers continue to want to learn more.