EDTECH Research

I very much enjoyed the challenge of this task. By being able to research a topic that I am interested in with regards to my work and upcoming projects at my school I was driven to go much further than simply researching and referencing five articles as was required from the rubric. In total I think I read about forty different pieces of research.

The real challenge was workflow. Picking out the most relevant research items that informed my instructional objective and finding the documents I wanted in the various libraries.

Where workflow was concerned I started by finding and downloading journal articles to read. At the start I was inserting the APA reference as I accessed an article. This seemed slow as I found myself spotting errors in the APA style and was tweaking this at the same time. Of course, upon reading the article, I would discover that it didn't rate being in my bibliography so I had wasted time! I decided to leave the referencing until I had found everything I was looking for and I proceeded to find and access many articles. On first glance, some seemed more relevant than others so I begun to separate them into different folders as I progressed. After I felt I had exhausted the research parameters and other relevant references in the bibliographies of the articles I was reading, I began to thoroughly read the articles and pick out those that provided value to my objective, identifying those that seemed most relevant.

In the end I had about ten articles that I had to re-search for to get there locations. The Google Research tool was very useful here and, I think, was quite accurate in it's representation of the APA style. I did find some errors but I'd say the referencing was around 95% accurate. As I was accessing the documents I had downloaded to get their article and journal titles I would reread the document and identify the elements of the published research that I would be able to use in the future in my school. This was the basis of my annotations.

I'm not sure if this workflow is the most efficient way of working but at least how I ended up doing it was better than where I started.

Normally I would print out an article and highlight the sections I was interested in. I found myself getting cross-eyed reading from the computer screen and had to leave my machine a lot to keep my focus but I am determined to do this work on my computer. When I come back to the articles I downloaded to create the plan I intend to present to the senior leaders of my school, I will aim to use the highlighting tools available in Acrobat Pro instead of printing everything off!

Edtech research Google doc