How Educators Can Use Blogs

As an educator, I believe that I could use blogs to help bounce off ideas with other educators or administrators. Learning from others is sometimes the best way to formulate ideas for my school or classroom. It can also be used as a tool with students to have them turn in assignments and create an out-of-school classroom discussion on topics or items learned throughout the week.

What I Have Learned About Action Research

Action research is a formative way for educators and administrators to define problems in the education system and create a beneficial change for their students based off of collaborative data and research. Generally, action research is reviewed by a leadership team who assess the situation and comes up with an action plan to be implemented by a group of teachers or the school as a whole and that is supported by administrators.

I believe that I can use action research in my course and that it can be beneficial to help me find ways to review data on journalism as a career for my students despite newspapers being a dying breed and there being a greater amount of convergence media. With this, I’d like to adjust my teachings to help students with a future career. I believe that action research does not necessarily need to be for a behavioral or academic success, but for the success of the well-rounded student.

Ideally, if I were to research this topic for my courses, I would like to get with journalism professionals and other journalism educators to define the problem of preparing students for a career in journalism with the ever-changing media methods. With this action research, I’d like to create a plan to benefit the students and change my teaching to prepare them for their future careers. This past summer I attended a conference in Phoenix, and this was a problem that we discussed. We all agreed that we faced an uphill battle for teaching our students for the future, I think if I met with some of the other teachers with the same type of demographics, that we could create a formative action research plan and implement new criteria and adjust our ways of teaching to benefit the students.