I broke my searching into 3 topics as blogged about in the previous post.
MY USE of technology to communicate better with my families:
Keywords: "using twitter in the classroom", "teacher communication with parents", "technology for parents",
"Using Twitter in the Classroom":
Searching the UBC library for articles on this topic was very limited but simply searching through Google, there was LOTS of blog posts on this topic. Too many to list but good to know more are out there.
BioScience article: Twitter: What's All the Chirping About?
TeachHub.com blog post: 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom
KQED blog post: Guide to Using Twitter in Your Teaching Practice **definitely look into in more depth - tons of links here to articles of how to use with parents
"Teachers Communicating with Parents using Technology":
When I searched "teacher communication with parents", it was too broad and gave me all kinds of articles about the studies on how parent communication improves student work. I added "using technology" to the end of this search phrase. I thought it might be too long of a phrase to search but it gave me some great results. I guess it's best to start with a long phrase of exactly what you are looking for then slowly take words away until you find what you want.
CITE Journal article: Enhancing Parent-Teacher Communication Using Technology
Technology, Pedagogy, and Education article: The state of affairs of teacher education with respect to information and communications technology
Electronic Journal for the Integration of Technology in Education article: Changing Instructional Practice: The Impact of Technology Integration on Students, Parents, and School Personnel
**It was interesting to look at the dates on some articles that I found. If it was dated earlier than 2010, I didn't use it. With this topic search, Google automatically turned my search into a "scholar" search which was very helpful in giving me educational research articles and not just any old blog posts. I'm not sure how I'd make Google search that without it simply suggesting it. Also, after searching for while in this scholar search, I noticed the sidebar gave me the option to check what years I wanted posts from! No more 1999 articles about technology!
"Technology for Parents"
"Apps for Parents"
These were too ambiguous and not related to education. I switched to "Education apps for parents" and checked the box "since 2011". Nothing related to what I was looking for. Tried "parents communicating with teachers". Nothing. I gave up this section of my search because this had taken me 30 minutes.
STUDENTS using technology for home schooling
"using technology for home schooling" (searched in Google)
While this book looks very interesting and I will research more for post #3, this search did not give me anything on home schooling. But Google suggested:
I thought this was interesting considering that I thought "homeschool" isn't a word. A quick google-ask told me:
I clicked the Google suggestion to search "using technology for homeschooling":
Temple University Dissertation: The impact of mindsets on literacy teaching in homeschooling environments: A chat analysis
University of Southern Mississipi dissertation: Relationships of Parental Homeschooling Approaches Including Technology Integration
**my results thus far, prompted me to add "in Canada" to my search and then swapped "homeschooling" for "distributed learning" to my search:
Technology and Education: A Primer - this is a Canadian study and the same premise as Why School?
Dissertation: DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF AN E-LEARNING GUIDE FOR THERELUCTANT HOMESCHOOLING PARENT Not Canadian but looks excellent.
After changing my search to "using technology in distributed learning" I stumbled upon this website: The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning Within the search box in this website, I searched my search keyword phrases above and found that the site is more of a college/university level. A good site to have found but will leave it for now.
"using technology for home schooling" (searched in UBC online library) then "distributed learning"
Canadian Journal for Education article: Reasons for HomeSchooling In Canada **investigate more
The Clearing House article: Common Arguments about the Strengths and Limitations of Home Schooling
>> overall, mostly related to higher grades and higher level ed.
MY ONE HOUR IS UP. It is easy to get sucked into other websites and searching within THOSE websites and I realized afterwards that there were many more elements of this theme from Blog Post #1 that I should have been searching. As my hour came to a close, I have realized that the work that I do with families who home school (homeschool? ;)) is more of a traditional home school model with a teacher who guides it - I only have K - gr. 9 students. I couldn't find an accurate description of what I am doing within any research at all. Is it out there? Am I using the wrong keywords? I could probably research for much longer.
Even though my hour is up, I spent a little longer on the additional keywords that I think I would be using more anyways:
Poor phrases:
"too much screen time for children"
"risks of technology in education"
"encouraging parents in technology"
Then is occurred to me that I shouldn't be searching within the Google Scholar Search so I switched over to Google and searched the same key words above:
BCTF Research Report: Distributed Learning enrolment inBC private schools grows rapidly—and public fundingfor private DL schools is boosted
At this point, I feel like I am less interested in this topic than I was before. I don't really want to know more about why distributed learning is growing etc. I want to shift my search into tech that kids can use and will be more than just using an app to learn math.
"technology for children in home schooling"
parentmap.com blog post: Homeschooling and Technology: The Allure for Modern Families
abouteducation.com blog post: Homeschoolers May Be Ahead of The Technological Curve
"technology in education "too much screentime""
techlearning.com blog post: Why You Should Let Students Have Unlimited Screentime
I have been blogging AS I do these searches to document my searching process as well as my developing thought processes. The more I search and think about these topics, the more I want to spend my time breaking down the Why School? model of learning in today's digital culture and use that as my model for developing some new ideas for my personal DL practices. I think I have found a key interest area and will create a separate blog post using what I've taken away from Why School?.
Wonderful post. I found the narrative style, that took me along during your 1hour+ adventure kept me very engaged and interested in your search strategies and types of resources you collected along the way. Even the small digression into the correct spelling of Homeschool was very interesting. You've really done a great job here making your learning transparent and insightful for others to learn from your experiences. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteHello fellow group member,
ReplyDeleteI like the way you document did your journey throughout the one hour. That is exactly how almost every search goes for all of us fairly savvy adults... And when kids have an hour or less, they expect the answers to leap off the screen at them, but the reality is that it takes a while to refine things and a fair amount of dedication, as well as a commitment to effectively skim read. I had a tough time just getting Gr 4s to find selected topics in a textbook today—after two sessions modeling. If it had been online...still more modeling, and extra skills training needed.