Innovation

On the 15th of May the MIT Spark innovative teachers met at Spark Headquarters to discuss the progress of their inquiry. Discussion at this gathering was based around how every individual has responded to the data that they collated.

This was a good chance for me to discuss the changes that I have made to my inquiry over the last couple of months. I discussed to the group how I reflected upon my data and this brought about a change to my whole inquiry. The inquiry I initially planned had no relevance to my data and I felt that the innovation part would not helped improve the issues I identified. So I explained that literacy was the biggest problem that I had identified within my class, therefore having to implement innovation to hopefully improve this issue.

The focus of this get together was the 'innovation' everyone was implementing in to their inquiry. I was still not clear on what I wanted to do in terms of my innovation. Due to focus being on improving self-efficacy in students writing, I had initially thought about voice comments. However, the feedback from the group on this application was not pleasing. With secondary school students being my focus, the tendency to click on the voice feedback will wear off after a certain amount of time, making it an ineffective tool.

Then someone suggested that voice typing could be a good option for reluctant writers. At this point and time I thought that this would be a great idea, especially for my students who struggle to get words down on their document. The innovative section of my inquiry had been decided and I felt really excited about how this could potentially help my students. The next step for me is to survey my students on how they thought about this idea.