I have decided on my inquiry question and begun my research. My question is, "How can the use of additional technology affect student engagement?" For the purpose of this inquiry, I will define "additional technology", as the technology we plan to use that is in addition to what is recommended or provided to us in the GCG or curriculum guide. In beginning my research, I am trying to locate other professional inquiries on similar topics. I am noticing that when searching for teacher research on technology and engagement, I find several resources that address one of the two, but not both, subjects. I may be venturing into the unknown, or maybe I just haven't stumbled upon the right resource yet. After investigating other inquiries, I plan to look for other published research that might assist me with my wondering.
Last year, I was introduced to the process of inquiry by reading The Reflective Educator's Guide to Classroom Research (Dana & Yendol-Hoppey, 2009) for our Seminar course. To begin, they walked us through the process, step by step, and started us off by having us choose a passion. This year, not only was I familiar with the process of inquiry and the 8 passions, but I had been thinking about what I might be interested in researching since summer break. I will re-visit the 8 passions in order to see which category my inquiry idea will fall into, and then I will dive into the process of narrowing my idea down to a specific question. What I know so far is that I definitely want my inquiry to involve technology in the classroom. This is going to very exciting, especially since I am expecting delivery of a class set of Android tablets to my CT and I's classroom. The other factor that I definitely want to include is how the use of technology will affect student engagement. Engagement is a huge focus for my partnership school this year, and I want to make sure to honor that focus. Now comes the hard part. I need to make this idea much more specific before I can begin collecting data. I'm considering to narrowing this to one content area, and making that content area either Math or Science, since our focus for our final year is on STEM. These are just some thoughts I mulled over while thinking about my inquiry so far. Hopefully these ideas will start to take shape very soon!
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