myPortfolio Action Research Cycle 2

For my second cycle of Action Research may aim was to find a greater balance between teacher-led instruction and student-centered inquiry. May students while keen to learn with computers expressed they still wanted some 'traditional' teaching elements. Thus the learning for the first three weeks of this unit was teacher-led with many collaborative elements and focused on developing key concepts. For the remaining three weeks students had to work in groups to create a page in myPortfolio with case study examples and evidence of their application of taught concepts. Students received robust feedback from their teacher and their peers during this process.

Results

Teacher Reflections

• When directing students towards research it is important topics are easily searchable.
• Some students copy-and-pasted much of their information from the internet. More guidance must be given about evaluating sources, citing sources and insisting informtaion be written in students own words.
• As with any group work, some students contributed more than others. Some students were challenged to manage poorly contributing group members
• Some students sabatoged their peers work, deleting their pages and writing menacing feedback comments. myPortfolio does not have a facility to track the actions of such persons or retreive deleted work which was problematic.
• Students produced high-quality work, refelcting depth in their understanding of key concepts
• Enthusiasm and on-task behaviour was high. 
• Two weeks was given for the group work component - less time was actually needed and students work rate slowed down considerably in the second week. 5 - 7 lessons would have been better. 

Student Voice

• I think I was more motivated because I knew that if I wanted to do well in the assessment I would have to go out and research in depth and I couldn't just rely on the teacher to give me the information I needed. 
• In my opinion people end up getting out what they put in, which seems rather fair to me.
• I think it helped us learn as a group and find the information ourselves. We all had to do something and we helped others in our group understand a certain part of the work. Making our own page was fun and sharing it, helped other people learn from us, as well as learning from them.
• We could add information and images to our pages and also link websites and videos to the page therefore allowing us to use a variety of resources. 
• Our group work was in one place and it was easy to find and we could work on it at the same time or from home too.
• It was really cool creating our own pages and puting our findings on it as we could share it with our peers and see what they are learning too.
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