All done!

Holy cow, it has been nearly 9 months since my last posting. I do not know where time has gone. To be honest with you I was more or less finished with my Lamar Educational Technology Leadership program in early February and had finished up in May of 2014. In the end, I do feel like my program made me a better educator, colleague and person and it had conditioned to me to the numerous responsibilities a school administrator and/or technology leader faces every day. This program literally got me into every facet of our school district and building and I would not have been able to finish or even start it, without the support of my awesome building administration. I have no regrets about entering this program and other than just a bit more paperwork that needs to be completed with the Nebraska State Department of Education, my completed program qualifies me for an administrative certificate and hopefully in about 8 weeks I should have that. Future plans? I absolutely love teaching Spanish and will continue doing so. One thing that I realized about my Lamar work was that after nearly two years of working on my master's, the easy part of my day was doing my daily task of being a Spanish teacher, everything else was a challenge. I have also been able to take my program experience and put it to good use in my own classroom with new integration of technology and different and improved philosophy with how I share my own pedagogy in the classroom. If an administrative position were to pop up in the near future I may or may not take it because I feel like there is so much potential in my own classroom that I have yet to tap that every day is an adventure that I look forward to. To anyone that has followed this blog, all of my friends and colleagues, thank you for joining me on this educational journey!

Update on Action Research Project: EDLD 5326 Week 5!

It has been a few months since I last checked in back in May but I spent a good chunk of June working on my action research project first draft for my 6th class. I'm currently in my 9th class and the end of my program is quickly approaching me. While I still would like to do an additional revision to my action research project, I will be finishing up my abstract this fall. Below is an update to my action research plan as requested in Week 5 of my EDLD 5326: Action Research Project Title: Plascotrac and its Effects on School Attendance Blog URL: http://travispatocka.blogspot.com/ Number of AR Project Documented Hours: 28 hours working directly with faculty on software instruction, diagnosis, training and teaching that I lead. Hours spent on research, first and second draft, reading and revising (over 40 hours). I spent 7 days (7 to 8 hours) in June working on the most recent draft that is present on my website and blog. This time was not included in the documented 28 hours, nor the prior time spent in research. Total time invested, close to 100 hours over the last 12 months. AR Project Summary (at least 250 words): I began my internship project in October of 2012 after several brainstorming sessions with my building principal to create a list of possible topics. We covered everything from looking at more parental involvement in the school to the possibility of hosting an on-site day care center at the high school. As I needed to make technology a part of the focus of my action research study, we decided on a piece of software our building was going to be testing for our district. This program, called Plascotrac, was installed in August of 2012 and was up and running literally the Friday before school was to start. The level of understanding of the program by our front end office assistants was functional, yet what we really wanted to discover from my research was whether or not the software would deliver as the company had promised in their research, as well as any additional features that could be used to encourage higher attendance figures. I began my research looking into just how Plascotrac functioned, how it would actually boost attendance and what features and options the program offered in order to save time and paperwork with more traditional methods of attendance taking. Even more importantly the idea of student absence, truancy and why students continue to show up late for school was investigated as one of the features of Plascotrac was how it was able to alert administrators early on to quickly get them in contact with students. By finding out why students were late and focusing on the problem early, in many situations the problem could be resolved. It was the highly detailed, yet easy to generate and easy to read programs that Plascotrac produced that helped administrators quickly follow up on student absence. My data was actually sourced from several sources as I felt I needed both qualitative and quantitative forms to balance out my research. I documented monthly attendance figures in a Google spreadsheet from the prior year with the current year and compared those figures in order to see if significant gains in attendance would be possible due to the newly installed Plascotrac software. My quantitative data pointed to an increase, albeit incremental, yet consistently each month with higher daily attendance after Placotrac had been used. This data was also shared with the public at a presentation that I made to our school board in May of 2013 on my preliminary findings. Other quantitative data was sourced from my literature review of school attendance because not only would Plascotrac tell us who was in school, but also the research that I investigated would explain why students choose not to be in school and how schools alleviated truancy and absenteeism with both traditional and technological means. My qualitative data consisted of interviews that I conducted with front office administration and a survey that was administered to front office assistants based on their experiences with the Plascotrac program. I am in the process of final revisions of my action research project paper, mainly formatting and citations as well as making sure the paper contains the entire action research process within what I have written. I have to write my abstract as I was informed to hold off until all of my research is complete and I plan to revise and check all data and data sources before my paper is dude. This entire process of action research, in my opinion, can have a tremendous impact on how you would make decisions on the instruction in your school. You learn where to look for the data, how to interpret it, and present as well as explain it to your stakeholders. You also come in close contact with the administrators in your building and district and learn to appreciate how wonderful it is to have such hard working individuals take an interest in your work as well as want to cooperate to help you succeed. I am beyond thankful for how generous all of those that I have worked with on this action research project have been and at times they had gone out of their way to supply me with the data that I needed to compose my report. The entire experience has been life changing and I do feel that I have matured professionally as I have learned how to do real, valid, research. Finally, I have invested considerable time in my research, readings, and paper production and have had to make little, it any changes from my preliminary reports. Good, constant communication with my building principal has ensured that I present updates on my data, research and findings to my building principal/mentor, as I wanted to maintain constant transparency about my work. In fact, I have found that through my research on the Plascotrac program, I have become somewhat of the go-to person when questions about the features and software should come up and have led several training session on the programs features and use with front office staff. This goes way beyond my initial beliefs that I would simply research data and learn to use the program. This additional portion of my program has also been tremendously rewarding.

Still alive and kicking!

Just finished up my 6th Lamar class and this program is flying! I am about to revise my internship plan an log and the good news is that I'm right on track and should have around 75% of my internship activities completed by the time I finish my next class. Each time I finished an internship activity I wrote up a summary and reflection on my google website. I just need to transfer those summaries and reflections to my internship plan and I should be set. I am also going to be revising how I deliver my curriculum. While I have been a steady user of wikispaces for about 4 years, to maintain the amount of curriculum on the website that I do, it really becomes time consuming as I have to make many changes at the end of the school year. Next fall, my students will receive a copy of the work for the year via a google drive download and the students will receive their lesson plan for the day via a google calendar. While the google delivery isn't as colorful or as interactive as wikispaces, I will be leaving more to the student to bring the most out of my class. I'm also thinking about having students create their own websites so that they can learn this valuable skill, as well as demonstrate an online portfolio of their work. Good stuff!

My first educational technology conference...

...and it was awesome! Even though I had a nasty head cold and congestion I made it through 10 different sessions and enjoyed all of the speakers. Didn't get to network as much as I had hoped for but that was mainly because there were so many great sessions. The conference that I attended was called NETA 2013 (Nebraska Educational Technology Association) and I was also a presenter. It was a great time!

Action Research Project Update!

While I had to spoil surprises, you will have to check out my Action Research Project Mid-Study Report. Technically, I am 2/3 of the way through this study and now in the early stages of the composition of my action research paper. My study involves the attendance report generation program PlascoTrac and the effects of PlascoTrac on student attendance when used in conjunction with action administrative and administrative assistant participation. This report includes updated attendance figures as well as anonymous survey results from my first surveymonkey.com survey. Great stuff and I am learning by leaps and bounds as to just how a school functions outside of the classroom, thanks in part, not only to my action research project for Lamar University, but also my internship plan with Lamar. You will find my research so far on a downloadable report on my Lamar personal wiki/google site. Below is the address to my google site. Enjoy! https://sites.google.com/site/travispatockaspanish/action-research-project-for-lamar/action-research-project-mid-study-report?pageMoved=Action%20Research%20Project%20for%20Lamar

Teamwork, and more teamwork!

I've been pretty busy as of late but I am able to share the fruits of our collaborative teamwork here with the world. The first website was created for us to learn how to work together as a team and design classroom instruction. This website is great for teachers as a easy to use website with lots of great technology resources, web links, instructional videos, etc. Our team, Team Honey Badgers put in the overtime to bring this website to you but through it we have formed some strong bonds, both as educators and, as friends. Check it out... https://sites.google.com/site/edld5366collaborativewebsite/home Our second website it currently in its' 4th week of production and is humming right along. This website offers science project ideas for elementary school, namely the 3rd grade. The mission is create complete units on earth science with short, easy to access activities which could be used to introduce the unit to the student, or can easily be integrated into the entire lesson. The idea is Universal Design for Learning which basically says that in the lesson, all class work, the student comes first. The ultimate goal is collaborative learning which helps students grow both emotionally and socially as well as work with technology. The idea of collaborative, social and tech based are all traits that in my opinion are now characteristics of today's students. Enjoy: https://sites.google.com/site/edld5363technologyintegration/

Another one down!

I just finished my fourth Lamar class last week, 5366 and I learned quite a bit. I finally dusted off the application folder with Photoshop CS3 on it on my laptop and used it for the first time. I used it to create a personal logo in 5366. I also discovered that Photoshop is a pretty complex program but after a few hours of use I was more comfortable with it. I also made a collaborative website for teachers using google sites and I will be doing this with my own Spanish department at my high school. What is great about collaboration is that everyone can contribute their talents to a project and you also learn effective teamwork, communication and following deadlines. Check out our teachers resource below... https://sites.google.com/site/edld5366collaborativewebsite/