Week 2 has been a crazy one!

Week 2 is coming to a close and I'm just now finishing.  I do not like finishing last-minute, but sometimes it has to happen!  With the summer swim league coming to a close, last week of fun summer camps for my kiddos and moving from one school to another one for me......This week has been CRAZY!  Thankfully, the assignments this week were interesting and easy to make myself complete.   The videos were very enlightening and I think provided much insight into the direction that we will be taking.  I have finally decided for sure on my action research topic and can't wait to get started.  I even gathered a few resources, met with our school counselor and ordered some literature to use!  Excited about starting on that!   I also enjoyed reading about the possible project choices on other people's blogs.   Some of you have really come up with some interesting ideas!  While I surely won't be doing 2 projects, many of your ideas will be things that I would like to gather and analyze data on, to see how those affect my school as well.  I'm about to go read Week 3 and hopefully get a little bit of an earlier start this week.  I sure can't figure out how we're going to do this once school starts!  I start back on the 8th....YIKES!

How can educators use blogs?

Blogs are a really great tool for educators to use to aid in communication with and learning from their peers.  Who wouldn't love to have a place to go read about what others who teach the same subject as you are doing in their classroom that's effective?  I know I sure would!  I currently follow quite a few blogs of other teachers in my district that share effective teaching strategies that they have found as well as neat products or software that they have bought for their classroom.  It provides a sounding board for the blog creator as well, as they are able to receive comments from the other professionals.  These comments are a great tool to use in their reflection as well.  I'm excited to now have my own blog as well as many new blogs to follow as we embark on this journey with our action research projects!  I can't wait to read about the other students' projects and their results as I'm sure we will all learn from and benefit from each others projects. 

What ACTION RESEARCH means to me...

At first the term "action research" seemed like a simple one.  I thought, "Oh, it's just going to be looking a bunch of stuff up and reading about it and then writing a really big paper on it." I also assumed that it would be something that I would use for this class or possibly for my whole grad program, but would never actually use it in my classroom. Boy was I wrong!  What I really realized is that most effective teachers are already using action research in their classroom, with the help of their administrators.  Most schools participate in PLCs and have teachers serving on Leadership Teams.  Both of those are effective ways to implement action research into schools easily.  While other teachers are doing effective action research on their own.  So, you may ask, "What is action research?".  Basically it starts with a guiding question.  Something that you think of as a problem that you want to solve or an area that you are wondering if it is working effectively or is successful in your classroom are school.  The question gets you started, then you have to start gathering data.  The data can come from various places such as standardized test scores, teacher-made assessments, discussions with students, behavior referrals, or the school attendance system, all depending on what type of data it is that you need.  Once the data is collected, it will need to be analyzed.  Then comes the most important part of all....REFLECTION!  The reflection is the part that takes the most time but it is also the most critical part.  This is the stage where you figure out what worked or didn't work and what you can do next to make it more successful the next time.  Overall action research is a process that makes perfect sense and one that all educators should be using.  When using it effectively, your classroom/school will run more efficiently and have amazing success!