Week 26 - Reflect on Your Inquiry (Taking Action)

What?

It's week 2 and I am seriously behind where I should be on the Taking Action part of the Spiral of Inquiry. I have completed all the assessment tasks and put the children into heterogeneous collaborative groups based on the information I currently know about them. I have started taking 2 maths groups each day for 20 minutes to do explicit teaching of multiplication facts (as this was highlighted as a need from the assessment data collected last week) I have ensured that there is a target child in each group. Each group has 6-7 students at varying maths number knowledge stages.  The students who are not with me are expected to complete multiplication fact tasks that I have organised. Some are computer based, pen and paper and some involve practising what I have just shown them independently. 

Initially finding tasks that involve multiplication and robots was extremely difficult. I asked for help from a member of the Digital Circus. Although after looking through the resources if I was to use them it would start to encroach on other areas of learning and they were not multiplication based which is the area of need.  Therefore after discussions with my collaborative teaching partner were she discussed what she was teaching her children my question to her was " where is the multiplication learning in the task" Her reply was that "there actually wasn't any, however the followup or independent tasks were very multiplication based". I felt a little frustrated that although we had set our inquiry question to use robotics to improve mathematical outcomes there were no available resources. I even posted on the teacher facebook page asking if anyone had any ideas I could use to no avail. 

So What?

After further discussions with my colleagues and observing what the students could do without robots I modified some of the activities I was given and came up with my own ideas. Interestingly the activities that I created meant that the students could use either the Beebot or the Probots that the students actually seemed more interested in using.

Attard (2012) warned that the use of robotics can in fact cause more of a disturbance and a hindrance which is exactly what I am experiencing because of the lack of resources. A lot of activities showing how to use robotics and  It's no wonder teachers don't use robotics when you have to create all learning tasks yourself! It becomes very time consuming.

Now What?

As a result of having to create my own learning tasks I really need to talk to the maths leaders in the school and see if they have any tasks that I can modify to meet the needs of my students. This will impact on my action plan because if I don't find more robotics resources I will be forced to use resources that don't include robots. 

Resources

Attard, C (2012) Teaching with Technology. Exploring the use of robotics to teach mathematics. APMC 12 (2)