I recently began an MA in Education. The MA is delivered by the Westminster Institute of Education; part of Oxford Brookes University. A modular course; it begins with the Postgraduate Certificate in Advanced Educational Practice (CAEP). Made of three modules; accounting for a third of the full MA, the course is delivered part-time with sessions held at my School.
The first module is a School-based Enquiry in which I have chosen to focus on my use of Google docs. As an enthusiast in the use of technology in the classroom; Google docs was one such technology that I believe had a significant impact on my student’s progress last year. It is my intention to try to quantify that by completing research into its impact on an individual class’ progress this academic year.
Building on the work that I did last year and recent improvements made to Google docs I am going to limit my research to one specific use of Google docs: How does it improve the quality of one-to-one assessment for my students? At the moment I am in the latter stages of planning this research. You can view my progress here.
The other modules that I will be undertaking this year are Assessment for Learning and Developing E-Learning.
Ii is my intention to document my progress throughout each module on my blog. To do so, I have created a dedicated page here. I hope, that by documenting it publicly, it will help me keep to a strict schedule while also providing opportunities for wider input and feedback on my research.
To maintain my organisation and productivity I have installed Evernote on my MBP, Android phone and in Google chrome to store and record notes. I have also linked my Oxford Brookes Library account with Google scholar to ease the logging of journal articles and essays. I will be mainly downloading these to read on my Sony eReader allowing me to attach notes. Finally, I will be tagging posts and tweets related to my research with #mainedu.
All the best with this, James – look forward to your updates! 🙂
Thanks Doug, I’m looking forward to blogging my progress.
I attended the first session for Module 2: Assessment for Learning this evening. After receiving a healthy sized reader for the module, I’m under no illusions that I’m doing the MA now.
First article to be read: Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment – Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, 2001.
In that case, I can guarantee that one of your next readings will be ‘Beyond the Black Box’ by the same authors! 😉
Hi James, I wish you the best of luck with the MA. I have started to use Google docs and find it an excellent application. I have also used Evernote for the past six months and find this a great resource. Your sharing of this in a public domain certainly puts the pressure on……….best of luck and if there is anything that I can help with please let em know. Nigel
Thanks Nigel. Please let me know how you get on with Google docs. I would be very interested to see how it is being used in another school.
I had my A2 Media students use it today to add a live document to their coursework blogs. They created their shooting schedules in a spreadsheet and then published them to the web. They then added a widget to their sidebar with a permalink to the spreadsheet. I can then keep a track of their progress at any point.
As for blogging my progress; it will definitely add some pressure but I hope that it is a good pressure, helping me to stay on track.
We will see how it goes. 😉