Journal

Sunday, 7th December 2008

I've been able to work on several pages this week as my commitments at work have lessened after performing two concerts. The staff meeting on Tuesday was interesting as 4 staff members shared their experiences using Photo Story 3. They were all women working with Preps and Grade 1 and they demonstrated Photo Stories they had made with their grades in around one hour. This was very impressive and exactly what I'm getting at as the enhanced presentation format fits in with my "variant graphics" take on animation.

This has also led me to change my stance on photos/video. A few months ago I was thinking that it would be more difficult to obtain permission to use photos/video but I've since concluded that such media is too useful to be omitted.

Sunday, 21st December 2008

I have 5 weeks off work now so I can get a lot more research done. I've been given the date for my presentation to staff which is Thursday 29th January 2009.

Wednesday, 31st December 2008

My ethics application has required me to answer some questions, two of which I've pasted in here. They relate to the fact that there is a dependant relationship between the researcher (me) and the students as I'm one of their teachers:

• My research further develops the existing practice of creating digital portfolios or efolios. As I'm using an Action Research methodology, knowing the children and teachers involved is an accepted part of this process. Although my research involves participants from the Primary School in which I teach, the students would be using multimedia regardless of my research as we are already using computers in our curriculum and are wanting to further develop this practice.

• My PhD research thesis is an Action Research Case Study. It is in a Primary School in the community in which I live where I'm a full time teacher in charge of Performing Arts for over 500 children. This is a whole school improvement plan to utilise multimedia in the presentation of children's work and learning. I work with the staff as a catalyst for using technology more readily in the classroom and the children's work (anonymously but with parental consent) becomes part of my annotated examples.

I also made the point that I'm not responsible for their assessment as my official role at the school is teaching Performing Arts and the Multimedia workbooks that the children compile are part of their general classwork which is assessed by their grade teacher.

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