EDLD 9397 Week 3 Web Conference Reflection

Dr. Borel began the web conference reviewing the critical dates calendar. I found this helpful as I was able to update my calendar and know when my future classes started and stopped. She also reiterated what updates to TK20 that are due by week 5. This was also helpful to be reminded of those tasks since week 5 is just around the corner and there is still a lot of work to be done. However the most helpful part of the web conference was Dr. Borel’s turorial in our APA assignment. I learned through question number 3 that it is important to make sure that the text is double spaced and that the first line is left justified and the other lines following must be formatted as hanging margins which is a five space indentation.  When citing a quotation the year must follow the author and placed in parenthesis. When Dr. Borel examined question 4, she taught us that when paraphrasing authors, the page number does not have to be included and the names of the authors do not need to be mentioned twice. She also talked about when to use the ampersand symbol and when it is not appropriate, yet I found this to be a touch confusing. During the review of number 8, the most interesting thing I learned was that the title of the book was formatted in italics and only the first word was capitalized. It was insightful to learn how to format a quote from a website during the review of question number 1 since that introductory question seemed to be one of the most difficult.

Action Update

I have completed the first 5 steps of my action research plan. I administered the surveys to the students regrading their confidence in writing and was not suprised to find that many of the students did not know how to begin to write a personal narrative. I also surveyed the teachers concerns with these students writing, and many indicated that not only is the ability to write a cohesive narrative or persuasive essay important, many of these students lack the application of grammar conventions. Therefore I have continued to follow the use of the writing workshop model and I have seen a great improvement in students' confidence and their grammar applications. I need to start sifting through some of the cuurent formative assessment data in Galileo, that the school implemented recently, in order to create a data tracking chart. My research plan will not be complete however until the state test scores come back this summer and then I will be able to compare these students previous 2012 scores.