So far so good...

Looking at my action plans I am confident that all is going well with the first two steps of my first plan. I have been meeting weekly and even a little more with my colleagues, second I have a place to store all of our activities and just worked on a way to help make it easier to send through email and download onto flash drives in the event any one of us leave the school we can take this with us and so we can share with other teachers. My third and fourth actions which involve identifying objectives or indicators that do not include technology based activities and then planning out activities using a variety of technologies is my focus. I feel that I have plenty of resources for this process.

First and foremost, I have my technology coach, Wendy, who works very closely with the math/technology coach at another middle school in the district. One email and she is supporting me in anyway, this is an invaluable resource. Second resource is my network of colleagues through my school, this program and friends I have built throughout the years. I believe in sharing and have built a huge network of people to share ideas with. This is outstanding!
A third type of resource I have is professional development through our district. Through this program we have met an educator that works with the SCETV and the Unitedstreaming system. She will be coming to my school on Monday, March 29th to help us learn new ways to incorporate all of the technologies they have available including online assessments. Through Discovery and ETV we have access to thousands of video clips and then can give online assessments and get feedback even when students work from home. Terrific resource!

My only concern is that I make sure I make time for actually producing finished projects, so I am making a Wednesday planning requirement for myself. If I have not created at least one activity by Wednesday then I have to spend Wednesday planning creating one! I just decided this as I reflected on my plans and realize that time is the only thing holding me back!

For my second goal, I felt confident also. However, I just met with a colleague about this and I have concerns about my plan. I was planning to focus only on the USATESTPREP.com data but she brings up the assessments we are getting evaluated on. We should be looking at those results and have students focus their practice based on this MAPS data. I would have to agree with her on this but also feel that these one day one time tests should not be the entire focus on my year. We discussed trying to have her focus on the MAPS scores and me to focus on the sites results and then move from there if we see a difference in our results. Only problem is our MAPS data is being taking next week for the year. This would be something we would have to try next year as soon as we start the year and begin with these students.

Then we had another concern and I would like anyone’s opinion that has done research like this. Would it be better for one teacher to use one technique, while the other uses another OR would it be better for us to both try each technique with between different classes or within the same class? We had feelings about this but I would like to hear others thoughts before I share our ideas.

Aside from this concern, I am loaded up with resources on were to get quality questions and have started to look over the site and learn how to make assessments and how to use them. We will however, be totally focused on Forced-Choice (Cennamo, Ross & Ertmer, 2009) format questions using this assessment. As I mentioned on my discussion post -- these type questions keep all the parents happy though so at least I will not battle a parent issue!!

Good luck to everyone and PLEASE share your thoughts and advise! And as always any and all ideas are welcome!!! Specifically in data analysis - as my colleague and I reviewed and really have a weakness on available activities on data analysis! Thank you!

LORI POWERS

References:
Cennamo, K., Ross, J., & Ertmer, P. (2009). Technology integration for meaningful classroom use: A standards-based approach (Laureate Education custom edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.