The teacher as action researcher Using technology to

The teacher as action researcher : Using technology to capture pedagogic form.

What is Action Research? Action research is the process of systematically testing new ideas in the classroom or school, analyzing the results, and deciding to implement the new idea or begin the process again with another idea.

Why Conduct Action Research in Your Classroom? Research has an important place in the field of education; still, it is difficult to distill much of it into definable practices that will change the way we teach. Action research, however, stands as a teacher's best chance at using critical inquiry to activate change, on their own terms.

How to Conduct Action Research: A Simple Methodology

1. Identify the question, issue, or problem. 2. Define a solution. 3. Apply the intervention and collect data regarding the intervention.

4. Analyze your findings. 5. Take action.

The paper argues that we make best use of learning technologies if we begin with an understanding of educational problems, and use this analysis to target the solutions we should be demanding from technology. The focus is to address the issue from the perspective of teachers and lecturers.

To consider how they could become the experimental innovators and reflective practitioners who will use technology well. Teachers could become 'action researchers', collaborating to produce their own development of knowledge about teaching with technology.

For this to be possible, they must be able to share that knowledge, and the paper proposes the use of an online learning activity management system as a way of capturing and sharing the pedagogic forms teachers design. An action research approach, like all research, needs a theoretical framework from which to challenge practice, and paper shows how teachers could use the Conversational Framework to design and test an optimally effective learning experience.

Examples of 'generic' learning designs illustrate how such approach can help the teaching community rethink their teaching, collectively, and embrace the best of conventional and digital methods. In this way they will be more likely to harness technology to the needs of education, rather than simply search for the problems to which the latest technology is a solution.