Week 4: Publishing/Leadership Project (part 2)

As we wind down the final month of a year long Action Research Project, I have come to the conclusion that my findings may be of interest to other independent school IT staff.

I am going to look into presenting my Action Research Project at the annual Florida Council of Independent Schools.  FCIS holds an annual conference that allows faculty, staff, and administrators to get together for fellowship and learning.

After brainstorming and presenting with fellow Full Sail classmates David Hotler, Ginny Holm, and Michael George in a private iChat session, I am finally confident that my final presentation is shaping up.  We took turns last evening presenting our projects and provided comments on each others performance and project content.

The following comments were made during concerning my project which I used to tweak my presentation which will be submitted next month.:

David Hotler says: Dennis I like the premise of this study.  I am always frustrated when I ask a question to the IT department and get back a form letter that hardly addresses the issue.  Here you decided to try and make the help desk more proactive and solve issues before teachers come to you in frustration.  Your research showed that most teachers prefer  videos over text responses but that you had some problems with teacher participation in the study.  It sounds as if you starting doing Action Research about one thing and as your research went on you realized the true root of the problem and shifted laterally.  This is great!  Actually this is what Action Research is all about!  Great work identifying that your research may have come up just a little short but only because you need more time to refocus and attack the problem from a new angle.  

The only failure here would be you giving up.  Stay active in this topic because it is immediately useful to you and your work environment.  You stated that you have 65 teachers for every one IT worker.  That is a large enough gap that you should be vigilant in further pursuing this issue.  Ideas for next time include providing only videos to start and gauge the reactions of teachers.  Also, build the survey right into the video with a link.  Last, house everything in a common place so that teachers can finish one video and see something like: “and teachers who found this helpful also watched...”  That way you can further advance preventative maintenance and increase productivity with technology.

Michael George says: Dennis great job on the project.  It is clear from your help desk call metrics that your training resources are being used by the staff.  I found it interesting that teachers preferred video instructions to text instructions.  Many of the older teachers I know like to print instructions out and follow them line by line.   I think making your self-help videos available your staff increased technology adoption and utilization at your school.   I see you struggled to get teachers to participate in your project.  At my school I am an ITL (technology leader) and I had a similar problem and I asked my principal if I could use 50% of a PD day to devote to “playing and learning” with technology.  All the teachers brought their laptops and we had a very productive afternoon.  I have found that teachers just need some unstructured playtime to absorb and understand the tool then ask questions.  Most teachers are willing to try new things if given time to work on it.  It is very difficult to change “habits of mind” and human nature is to revert back to the old methods that are well understood and provide a high degree of comfort.  For many, technology can be quite abstract and complex.