I'm excited about the possible Structured Inquiry Question for "action research" this year. Here's the question: What are students opinions of their learning in math through various instructional techniques? Some possible ways to gather data around this question will be to get students to think about their learning (How well did I accomplish the learning and language goals today? not at all, a little, very well, so well that I could teach someone else, I already knew it). This could be documented with exit cards, Activotes, etc. I think I could also observe the engagement of students, amount of nurse and bathroom visits and possibly test scores (classroom, MAP, MCA).
I enjoy the big picture conversation about rethinking teaching and learning. However, I continue to have trouble imagining how to apply some of the blogging, wiki, stuff we've used in my 3rd grade classroom. One thing I have learned for sure is that in order for my students to participate in these ways in middle school, I need to more seriously focus on keyboarding skills in 2nd and 3rd grade.
I would love to learn about some other search engines like kidsinfobits, where good information with reading levels is easy to search for primary kids. Since my students are switching between "learning to read" and "reading to learn", I'd like to find both fiction and non-fiction books on-line that read the text, while highlighting it in order to support those students still learning to read.
