October's research reflection questions were a bit tougher to answer. I am excited to be working with a new group though and that is reflected here. Enjoy!
- How did your participation in course activities this month contribute to your understanding of action research (specifically) and the role of research in educational technology (generally)?
- Most of my learning this month has taken place behind the scenes with my research group. We have been working on finalizing our proposal and writing our literature review. I feel like I have read so many articles that my head is swimming. This month I switched groups from a games in learning focus to a technology for gifted students focus. I really enjoyed the change and I’m having a great time researching what technology can do for gifted students. Research in educational technology is essential because technology is always changing. One of our feedbacks on our proposal was that we should stick to classroom practices rather than focusing on specific learning platforms. This really speaks to how technology changes because a specific website that we find this month may not exist next month.
- Why is it important for researchers - from whatever field, and inquiring via various methodologies - to familiarize themselves with peer reviewed literature?
- This question takes my mind straight to science practices. Any research that is done in the field of science has to be reviewed by peers before it can become common knowledge or a scientific theory. This practice should be no different in the education field. Before we can say that something is the way to teach or learn, it should be researched from all angles, in a variety of settings, and by a variety of researchers. It seems that there are more people doing scientific research than educational research though. There are scientists in all different fields studying a variety of things. People in the education field teach and learn rather than do research all the time.
- How have you become a discerning consumer of scholarly research through your literature review activities this month?
- This month I started working with a group researching gifted students and technology to help differentiate with them in the classroom. I had previously been working on games in learning. I have done lots of research on games in learning in the past in this degree program so I have been able to follow new developments in that field over the last few years. Gifted students are a new field to me, however, so I was a very voracious consumer of scholarly research this month. My group collected over a hundred articles so I have been going through those and learning what I can about gifted students and how technology can affect them.
- Ask yourself a question about your research activities, and provide a meaningful answer.
- I am interested to see which scholarly article I find most intriguing this month. Last month I found Classcraft and was really intrigued by this concept. However, its usefulness for gifted students is limited. This month I liked reading an article that we used in our literature review called Differentiating Low Performance of the Gifted Learner: Achieving, Underachieving, and Selective Consuming Students. This article was so useful to me because it was the first one I read that further divided gifted students into categories. I hadn’t realized that gifted students could be so different that they needed even more categories. This article went into depth with how to teach each subcategory and it got me thinking about specific technologies that could reach each one.
- What are your enduring curiosities about (action) research, and how might you pursue these interests?
- I am still interested in specific platforms that might be used to teach gifted learners. I know that we were told in our proposal that we should look at specific practices rather than platforms but I would still be interested to see what is out there. I assume that other people have tried to differentiate to gifted students using technology before so I am interested to see what their findings would be. Do they use something like Classcraft? Do they have the gifted students do mentoring? Do they differentiate in other ways? In order to answer these questions I will look for more scholarly articles that surround specific websites or platforms that have been used for gifted students in the past. I hope to find some that I can use in my own classrooms.
- I am still interested in specific platforms that might be used to teach gifted learners. I know that we were told in our proposal that we should look at specific practices rather than platforms but I would still be interested to see what is out there. I assume that other people have tried to differentiate to gifted students using technology before so I am interested to see what their findings would be. Do they use something like Classcraft? Do they have the gifted students do mentoring? Do they differentiate in other ways? In order to answer these questions I will look for more scholarly articles that surround specific websites or platforms that have been used for gifted students in the past. I hope to find some that I can use in my own classrooms.