Narrowing in on an Inquiry Project

I just spent the last hour discussing Twitter clients (apps that you can use to access Twitter) and read-it-later services with my husband.  Are we geeks or what?  But honestly, I feel lucky to have a knowledgeable resource always accessible.  When I get stuck I know Justin will be able to help me out, or keep persisting until he can figure it out too.  I am still trying to decide how best to use Twitter, and was pleased to discover the feature of “lists”.  You can create lists of people you follow on Twitter, and sort your feed by those lists.  In case you couldn’t tell from my 10 minutes of fame, I like being organized!  I want to follow more “experts”, but I didn’t want to overwhelm my feed with tweets so that I would miss important things from my personal colleagues.  I created a list with people from this course, so now I can filter my feed to see just tweets from that group.  Once this post is done I am going to download the “Twitterific” app.  Justin uses “Tweetbot” and he wants me to be a guinea pig with this one so he can compare.

This morning’s class was very useful.  I appreciated the chance to reflect (again) on where I am, and where I’d like to go.  As we went around the circle sharing our ideas, I refined my own topic, and am quite excited about it.  I am going to look at the topic of technology in primary classrooms.  I taught Grade 1/2 this past year, and expect to teach Grade 2/3 next year.  Most of the primary teachers at my school do not use technology very much, so I am hoping this research can bring about some change at my school.

Right now my thoughts exist mostly as a series of questions, which will hopefully guide my research.  I have recorded most of them in my mind map in the previous post

• Is technology appropriate for primary students?
• What kind of technology is best for primary students?
• What are effective ways of using technology with primary students?
• What is an appropriate amount of screen time for students?
• Is screen time used for educational purposes different than screen time used playing games or watching videos?
• Which activities should we use technology for and which are better done the “traditional” way?
• What apps and web apps are developmentally appropriate for primary students to use?
• How much should students be connecting with others online?
• What does digital citizenship look like in primary?

I feel like this is a lot of questions, and I might need to focus in a bit, but I am looking forward to doing some research this week to find out more about these topics.