Week #4 Reflection

This week my assignment was to create twenty annotated bibliographies to use for my literature review.  At this point I have been able to compile sixty annotated bibliographies, which at first sounds like a lot, but personally I feel there are topics that I still need to research. This will be an ongoing process as I write my literature review.  At this point I feel like I could still read another sixty articles and still just be scratching the surface about the topic using technology to increase parental communication.  However, after reading all these articles I am more confident about the topic and I am interested to learn more. I also included in my search how to increase parental communications using technology with English Language Learners. This is a huge concern at my school and I would like to include this in my Literature Review.  

It is important for me to synthesize the research on my particular topic.  The more articles I read the more information I find I still need to gather.  Having completed the sixty annotated bibliographies has provided me with a good starting point for my literature review. This information will allow me to start an outline that will give me organization and structure to start writing my literature.  As I begin this process I am certain as stated above that I will still be researching articles to find information that I may have overlooked in my previous research.

I personally have learned that organization and time management is vital component to completing this assignment.  If you try to do too much at once it turns to frustration and mediocre work.  I find that this is also true in life. It reminds me of a quote that my father overuses “moderation is the key to success.”  Once again creating an outline for my literature review will give me direction and organization.  I find if I do not have clearly defined steps/outlined I often find that I can go off on a tangent and waste valuable time on areas not relevant to my research.

For this assignment I continued to use a graphic organizer template and GoogleDocs. I also I set goals in which I had to read 3 to 4 articles a night. I didn’t focus on a specific topic for this set of annotated bibliographies. However, I looked up other articles/research that I had from previous annotated bibliographies to guide my research.  It took me two weeks to finally organize my articles in alphabetical order as I created my annotated bibliographies/ order. This was a step that I often had to do at the end of my twenty articles which was extremely time consuming because I had to cut/paste and reformat. This saved me about an hour of time!

As I stated in my previous blog I enjoyed reading the dissertations.  This week I found a few dissertations that I thought would pertain to my research. Unfortunately I had to request some of them from ILL. Unfortunately, a few of the dissertations that I wanted to read I had to purchase.  I am impressed with the turn around time with ILL. It only took a day to receive this information.  I am still considering purchasing one of the dissertations because I think it could be extremely informative.  I also purchased a book from Amazon Social Media for School Leaders a comprehensive guide to getting the most out of Facebook, Twitter and Other Essential Web Tools by Dr. Brian J. Dixon. I am looking forward to reading.  As I reflect back to the first week of class (like you stated) prewriting actually did begin back when I selected my topic and I began writing my question stems. That was an “aha moment.”  

I still need to research teacher-to-parent communication and training techniques using social media. I have been searching the various databases and only find limited periodicals with a excerpt about schools/teachers using it as a communication tool. I am going to contact Dr. Dennis for some insight regarding searching this topic.  Hopefully it is as simple as redefining my search terms.  I am going to keep my fingers crossed. I am a little concerned there is limited research on this topic because from the articles I have read it seems there is limited research.  I know there is information out there I just need to keep looking!