The question that I plan to explore for my Master's Action Research Project is: how can I teach educators to use technology as a collaborative tool in examining student writing work to impact practice? Originally, I had planned to focus my question on teaching students. However, as a staff developer, my daily focus would be on training and educating teachers on ways to improve their literacy instruction; therefore, I felt that my work and my research would be better served by a question that also focused on teachers.
In an electronic environment, teachers can view student work at any stage from anywhere without carrying around huge volumes of notebooks and paper. They can also share student work easily with other teachers without depriving the student of their notebook for any length of time. It also eliminates the need for complicated time management among several teachers with very different lives and schedules and priorities. Teachers can collaborate online at home, at midnight or during lunch time at school.
I have experienced online collaboration with another teacher. We were both researching ways to improve student discourse during book club discussions. Because of our very different schedules, and because we wanted to collect data in the form of a transcript of our talk, I suggested that we use Google Talk to discuss the story. This way, we could easily monitor the length of our talk because it was right there on the screen; we could copy and paste a complete transcript of the discussion with no additional effort; and we could conduct the talk at a time and setting which worked for both of our schedules.
I have also explored other tools which could be used for professional collaboration. Nicenet, although it is designed for teachers and students, is useful because it allows private and public messaging, eliminating the need for lists of email addresses; it includes a schedule of upcoming events to keep everyone on pace; it functions somewhat like a wiki in the sense that both administrators and users can post conferencing topics and responses; and it has space for uploading documents which could easily take the form of student work upon which to collaborate. There is also an area of the environment in which users can post links; I can envision these links taking the form of ERIC documents related to the collaboration or even to YouTube videos which could provide models of practice.
