Playing around with a Research Topic

For Assignment 1 for EER 500 we have to propose a research topic and then we are going to deconstruct whether the question is good or not.

Research Topic Statement

The focus of my research is the link between the pervasiveness of technology and the decline in critical literacy writing skills as demonstrated by the rise in plagiarism (Gabriel 2010) and students inability to produce authentic writing, which demonstrates critical thinking.  The importance of this issue isn’t to turn back the clock on how we are teaching writing skills, but identify a way to work strategically with ICT in the classroom.

Draft Research Question

How can information technologies, engage teenagers to develop their persuasive writing skills and demonstrate critical thinking whilst minimising the opportunities for plagiarism?

Research Topic Statement

For many years the media has speculated about the decline in student’s writing skills, citing the rising issue of plagiarism in the classroom and at university (Gabriel 2010).  The current generation has been labeled the “copy and paste generation” due to high use of technology, different study habits to previous generations and the emergence of disruptive technologies in the classroom and home. Our school’s 2012 NAPLAN results show that our 2013 Year 8 cohort have shown excellent reading skills but have very weak persuasive writing skills. Year 8 teachers verify that the students have shown poor authentic writing ability in both Humanities and English.

The Pew/Internet report “Writing, Technology and Teens” (Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, Macgill; 2008) confirms that although teenagers are writing more than ever, but their easy access to information and their unstructured approach often leads to laziness when it comes to more structure to their writing processes. This laziness and easy wide spread access to information can lead to plagiarism.

My research interest has come about from many years of teaching Humanities and seeing the way in which teachers use ICT in their classrooms without regard to how it might be impacting on traditional skill development. Often they are naïve to the implications of incorporating ICT into a task that might have normally been done offline therefore

References

Gabriel, T. (2010). Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age. The New York Times, [online] 1st August. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/education/02cheat.html [Accessed: 25th March 2013].

Lenhart, A., Arafeh, S., Smith, A., & Macgill, A. (2008). Writing, technology and teens. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Writing-Technology-and-Teens.aspx

Evering, L.C. & Moorman, G. (2012). Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(1), 35–44. doi: 10.1002/jaal.100

McCord, A. (2009). Detection and Deterrence of Plagiarism in Online Learning Environments. In P. Rogers, G. Berg, J. Boettcher, C. Howard, L. Justice, & K. Schenk (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Second Edition (pp. 604-615). Hershey, PA: . doi:10.4018/978-1-60566-198-8.ch087

Measuring the effectiveness of Guided Inquiry in the classroom

I came across this great article which has some interesting things in it about Guided Inquiry in Schools and Evidence Based Practice.

At the moment we are developing our Whole School Information Literacy strategy and part of it is showing the school community that we are making a difference.

"The project and case study are discussed as student practice, and as a means of gathering data about student learning using the School Library Impact Measure (SLIM) Toolkit, while highlighting the use of wiki as an organising tool. "

The School Library Impact Measure Toolkit can be found on the Reuters web site with some great examples of some reflection sheets.

I am looking forward to reading about the result of Fitzgerald's research and trying it out for myself.

References:

Fitzgerald, L. (2011). The twin purposes of Guided Inquiry: guiding student inquiry and evidence based practice. In Scan Vol 30 No 1 
http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/schoollibraries/assets/pdf/guidedenquiry.pdf

Welcome 2013

I probably didn't blog enough in 2012 to justify the presence of this blog, but I grant you that it was a very busy year!

January, marks the mid way point through my Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship) and the subject that I am doing this semester is EER500 Introduction to Educational Research. I am actually looking forward to it as I am starting to like the research process and the resulting writing and thinking that improves as a result of it.

I had coffee this morning with the thesis whisperer where we spoke about lots of issues with writing and research ability from "why aren't the kids learning this in high school" through to "why don't teachers use research to guide them". Lots of great ideas, thoughts and avenues for investigations.

If you haven't read it, download and read her ebook on how to tame your PhD (or order a hardcopy). Although I am far from writing a PhD, I found it useful and insightful in regards to my Masters.

Creating a vision for a school library

Here are some notes from the unit of work that I completed on creating a vision for a school library:

Vision 2013 - 2015

“The Library supports the school’s vision, value, teaching and learning programs through the creation of a physical and virtual collaborative ‘knowledge commons’ fostering creative, independent and critical lifelong learning skills, through the development of proficiency in information literacy, digital literacy and literature enrichment.”

How different leaders can impact on the School Library

School libraries are undergoing a transformation and the teacher librarians that work in them need to be client focused and not resource or operations focused, to meet the needs of both the students and teachers that use their services (Winzenried, 2012; Welch, 2006).

Google impacts the way students think

Facinating article from teach thought, "How google impacts the way that students think", which reinforces the many theories that Nicholas Carr talks about in his book "The Shallow". That the technology is effecting the way in which our brains develop and change.

In particular, this article  talks about how there are better search engines out there to meet the needs of kids and as educators we need to be strategic in the way we teach and reinforce research skills. We also need to evaluate the tools that the kids use in class. Try looking through this list before you set a research task for your students; 20 best search engines for students.

Talk like a Pirate Day

It is the 10th Anniversary of Talk like a Pirate Day and Tori's Kinder are celebrating with a dress-up day.

Even though she has not seen Pirates of the Caribbean, she has a pirate costume from it. Hubby made a cardboard sword for her and she is so excited! Agrr!!!

What is going to be interesting is when it comes to singing "what can we do with a drunken sailor". She knows every verse courtesy of her Opa!

Have a great Talk like a Pirate Day!

How would you design your new Library space?

I came across this wonderful link with pictures of a Learning Commons in Perth, Wesley College 
Trenaman Library. A few of the images got me a bit excited given the school that I am working at is in the throws of re-designing a new library/learning space.

Source via Flickr

I love this little reading space that Wesley College has. Coincidentally, I was at Endeavour Hills Library tonight for a talk and they had a nice little space smack bang in the middle of the fiction setting. The Librarian was saying that "teens" normally like this space. It was a nice surprise when I moved through the Fiction space to see a nice casual space that invited you to sit down and grab a book.

Many researchers, including Winzenried (2010), talk about Libraries as being all about the relationship between the learner and the resources. Creating environments where the learner, teacher and resources interact seamlessly seems to be a commonality between many new library environments.

Source via Flickr

These study booths are wonderful! Very 1950's, I can imagine my students packing into these booths to either play computer games or work on a project. I can imagine students bringing their own devices and lunch and eating in this space.

Eating in the Library/Learning Commons is quite a contentious issue! Winzenried (p223, 2010) states that "rules such as the 'No food' oldie must be reassessed, and quite possibly consigned to the dustbin of history". Talk to our Librarians and they will tell you that when kids bring food into the Library, they feel like cleaners. They spend most of their time chasing food waste. So if you were to allow food, would you need some bus boys like cafe's have? ie. people to purely clean throughout the day.

Source via Flickr

Here is another booth at the Bill Robertson Library, Dunedin via their Flickr page. The colours and textures look fabulous and the dividing wall all the way up to the roof would be good for sound control. The idea of a TV or even a touch screen in each space could work wonderfully. There is a virtual tour of the library space including lovely quiet study spaces surrounding the Atrium. Everywhere I look I can see power points acknowledging the BYOD environment that the University has. Bill Robertson Library has a "student lounge" with access to vending machines, hot and cold drinks.

Source via Flickr

Back to Wesley College, and I love the aesthetics of these "thinkers" at the end of each row of books. Conversation starters for teachers and students and perhaps even the opportunity to think about how these people contributed to society. There is something to be said for clean lines.

There is a lot of great articles and research papers on the lessons learnt when designing a library space. Designing Libraries UK has some great links to architectural firms who have designed libraries. Library as Place has some good articles on the evolution of the space.

Leadership Styles

Goleman(2002) in his book "The New Leaders" talks about six fundamentally different leaders. Four of them are positive (visionary, affiliative, democratic and coaching) and two others which can be harmful to an organisation.

I found the reading to be fascinating. Having worked in a variety of independent schools (co-ed and single sex) over the breadth of my career it was interesting to read a description of a leader and think "I know someone like that".

David Loader was the Visionary Leader. I worked at MLC for three years towards the end of "The Loader Years" and it was great. There was a lot of talk about where the school was going, there was a culture of learning and he was confident enough to be able to say "yes" to an initiative that he felt was worthwhile. I suspect that other leaders might have been too democratic and demanded a committee to evaluate proposals, but David would approve something on the spot. This has a positive effect on staff and the wave of enthusiasm, that often encompasses innovation, would continue. I still make reference to many of the documents that I contribute to during my time at MLC.

Susan Danckert, former Principal at Academy of Mary Immaculate, was a Democratic Leader. She was skilled in involving her staff in decision making, even if the reality was that she made the decision earlier. She had a system where she would lunch in the staff workroom once a week. She wouldn't say much, just listen to the issues at hand. This informal way of gaining feedback often resulted in things being done differently or processes being improved.

Dr Timothy Hawkes, former Principal of St. Leonard's College was an excellent example of a coaching Leader.  In my second year of teaching I had a short term contract at St. Leonard's. Dr. Hawkes was all about improvement. Every morning was a staff briefing. He didn't regurgitate what was on the briefing sheet but he talked about how we could improve student learning, whether it was for a student who was having difficulty or a year level that we had to focus on. Dr. Hawkes taught Year 8 RE, and this gave him operational knowledge to make changes. He was all about developing others and reading through his newsletters gave you this sense of "coaching".

The importance of Evaluation

I'm a systems kind of gal and it struck me while reading through the Beare, Caldwell and Millikan (1989) [1] readings for Uni is that many schools that I have worked in have completely overlooked the importance of evaluation.

The perception is that once a program is delivered, that it is successful by default. The students turned up, the teachers taught, ergo it was successful. The ability to set key criteria and then evaluate them is completely overlooked by management. What if every teacher had to distribute an evaluation sheet at the end of each of their classes? What impact would that make?

At the end of last Semester, I got my Year 7 class to write me a report. Overall I was pleased with their feedback. More chocolate, less brainstorming(or thinking skills) activities. Feedback from the kids ranged from a blank page, and a few scribbled things through to full blown reports explaining my strengths and weaknesses. The kids were surprised when I asked them, but even more surprised when I chatted to them about the areas for improvement the first day back.

How does this relate to TL's? What if a TL could do a quick survey (the technology exists) of a year level after a research project was submitted, but before the marks came back? As Beare, Caldwell and Millikan state "Evaluation is the gathering of information for the purpose of making a judgement". It shouldn't be a discrete activity, or carried out in isolation. They make the statement that every aspect of the organisation should be evaluated at one state. I would propose that an individual classroom teacher should at least to one evaluation each subject cycle, ie. Semester. At the senior levels, evaluation at the end of each outcome or major assessment task would be useful.

I have worked in schools that had an appraisal system in place and the presentation of such evaluations would hold you in good stead with the Principal each year. It would show that you were open to the opportunity of continual improvement.