With the new school year, our wiki has become much more utilized.  Our district has required us to have weekly PLC meetings this year, because of the new curriculum we are implementing (CCCS) and the new evaluation system.  Not only has the principal's evaluation system changed, we are now required to set SLT's, or Student Learning Targets, for each of our students in Math and ELA skills; however, since I do not teach Math, I wrote my ELA SLT, then partnered with the kindergarten and first grade French teachers to write science SLT's for my Social Living students.  There are no standards through CCCS for Science as of yet, so we used the current GLE's and Benchmarks for kindergarten and first grade students for science, specifically for classification skills since that is a major portion of our instruction in K-1 science.  During the first nine weeks of the year, first grade has not had afternoon bus duty.  We have taken this opportunity to meet in person every week.  However, this month we will all start having bus duty, so we have been given permission to use our wiki for every other PLC meeting.  The wiki has already been utilized as a PLC a great deal:  we have downloaded Math pacing charts for CCCS, lesson plans, activities, and websites, among other helpful learning tools.   My co-workers have not been the only ones accessing the wiki.  We have also shared our wiki with teachers from other schools in the district, as well as from other states, who are implementing CCCS this year.

10/24 I attended the first PLC meeting with the other first grade teachers. They are very generous to include me in their group. I explained what I was going to try to do this year, creating a wiki for our use. I hope I can repay their generosity by making the wiki easy for them to use and access, with valuable tools they can integrate into their lessons. M.W.

Draft Action Research Project Report

Here is the a link to the word document containing my Draft Action Research Project Report.

https://sites.google.com/site/mariannedesaixwallace/draft-action-research-project-progress-report

 

       

My Action Research Project has not gone very well this year.  In fact, it has not gone at all.  Even though I have tried repeatedly to encourage them, my co-workers have been very resistant to even trying to access the wiki, mainly because they did not want to get a g-mail account & have to create a new password.  I tried to duplicate the wiki on our BlackBoard site at school, but it just will not work as well as the google wiki, for several reasons:  it does not have the same format at all; we cannot access YouTube videos; I cannot add pages as easily; there are not near the same number of options to add items to the wiki or to personalize it; things placed on the Blackboard wiki do not all show up the way they do on the google wiki; and the Blackboard wiki is really intended to be a class option, to be shared with students, not co-workers.  I am kind of frustrated with my co-workers; they didn't even have to do anything to the wiki this year--it was created and maintained by me, strictly for their convenience.  Their refusal to try something new is pretty characteristic of the stumbling blocks that mainstream American education throws in the way of technology integration into instruction.  Many veteran teachers refuse to try something new, even something that could help them out.  I am trying to persuade them one last time to give it a try.  If they are still resistant, I will have to change my plan.  One thing may work in my favor:  the major reason I started this was as a timesaver for my co-workers.  With 8 people in our PLC, and several of them with young children, it is very difficult to find a time to meet with everyone twice a month, as required by our administration.  Also, when we do meet, it is a grade level meeting, not really a collaborative process, and certainly not professional development or professional idea exchange.  If I can get approval from my assistant principal (who is also my mentor) to allow us to use access of this wiki as one of our two monthly meetings, then I will be hitting both of the two things I hoped to accomplish:  1)Finding a way to share my new found knowledge with my co-workers; and 2)being able to save them that most valuable of teacher resources-time.