That’s a wrap...
School can sometimes be really boring especially when many teachers decide to read straight from the textbook. Can this be changed for the better? Can Personal Electronic Devices be used for the greater good? Well in my group’s PED Project we decided to test this and see if implementing PEDs could increase student engagement and achievement. At the beginning, we needed a starting point so we surveyed the class we working with. Afterwards, we implemented Poll Everywhere which is the PED tool that we implemented. At the end, we surveyed the class again to see if there was an improvement. Sadly there was no way to tell due to the fact that we only did this once.
This project took a lot of mini tasks to finish. I would say that I did help out a great deal of this project. The things that I did was that I wrote a proposal which was used to see if any teachers wanted to work with us, as well as put all over planning on a spreadsheet (this included over deliverables as well as our Gantt Chart.) In addition to this, I also helped with the creation and presentation of the questions for our Poll Everywhere demonstration. Furthermore, I helped with some of the surveys we made to track the classes progress and how the students and teachers felt with this new technology being brought into their classroom. Lastly, I helped out with our Executive Summary.
I think that this project was not a complete success. I can say yes we did complete something but it was not the goal that we originally planned. Our main goal was to see if there was a correlation between student engagement and achievement, we did not really see this until the end. I think that this was because we didn't have the time. This project relies on the cooperation with other teachers. I think if we could test this multiple times with multiple classrooms I think this would be a success. But with the resources we had, I believe that what we accomplished was still great. Not only did we teach the teacher we were working with Poll Everywhere, we also introduced Google Classroom. I think this project can be a partial success because we did not meet our goal yet we accomplished something.
If I could go back and change something from this project I would probably change the fact that we only did one trial with the class. To really see if there is a change in student engagement and achievement when PEDs are implemented takes time. Since we only went in once we didn't see the full effects. Yes, we saw that more kids were paying attention, but I feel in this project there should be an impact. We do not know if after this project the teacher we worked with continued with it or just stopped. We do not know if it really worked. I feel like if there was a chance where we could have gone in a couple more times I think then we would have seen if there was a possibility of increasing student achievement and engagement.
Some suggestions that I would give to improve this project would be to see if there was a way to get more teachers involved. Even though yes this would be a hard thing to implement I feel like having more teachers involved with PEDs is important. Even though I have been in the class of the teacher we worked with and saw his teaching as something that was already engaging he still found things to take away. I think that a lot of teachers should open up to the idea of having PEDs, due to the way the world is going. Students go to each of their classes and expect the same thing, either reading from the textbook or off the board. No matter how interesting the topic may be everyone finds this boring. Having Poll Everywhere or a Kahoot really makes a difference. People look forward to classes. I think that teachers need to stop being afraid of a new technology's afraid of breaking things and have fun with it.
