Week 19 - Community of Practice

As a part of my digital and collaborative inquiry I choose to focus on:
-  How blogging and using google docs would improve student engagement and skill in writing?

A community of practice as “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis” (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002, p.4). In Wenger's article on Communities of Practice and Social learning Systems (2000) he outlines that there are three key areas to a community of practice, joint enterprise (domain), mutuality (community) and shared repertoire (practice). 

Domain:
I realise that being a part of the Manaiakalani Outreach Programme puts me in a wider Community of Practice where the schools in our cluster are aiming to improve students engagement and learning through the use of digital technology.  

Community: Within my school the senior syndicate I am a part of provides a community of practice. As a syndicate we are looking to improve students engagement and skills within writing. 

Practice: We intend to do this using blogging, so that students can reflect and share their learning, whilst also engaging with one another and their parents regarding their learning. We are also looking at using google docs to help improve writing by using this tool to collaboratively write. We will be required to integrate this into our everyday practice and reflect together for the remainder of the year.

In this inquiry I feel the students will benefit as research suggests using tools such as blogging and google docs allows students to see other students writing and comment to improve their own writing (Woodrich, Fan, 2017). Our students enjoy using technology to complete their work and find it motivating to use the tools available to them. I feel it will enable them to engage and collaborate more. 
However this will have the greatest impact for our community of practice, the senior syndicate at my school. The focus of this inquiry will require us to take into consideration how we teach 21st century skills and how we engage students and give them agency. It will cause us to consider how we use digital technology and design learning tasks to benefit our students. Connecting our students not only within our school but our cluster we belong to.

As a senior syndicate we are really motivated to see how using google docs and blogging will improve our students writing. We are lucky to have 1:1 devices in both Rooms 1 (chromebooks) and Room 4 (iPads). However not every class has access to 1:1 and in Gleeson's report (2010) it suggests this becomes a point of frustration and road block, we also need to consider that students can see how blogging as writing and improving their writing. I feel that each member of the syndicate see the benefits of using google docs and blogging to improve students engagement and are interested in investigating how we can use them effectively to improve collaborative and agency skills. The research from Manaiakalani suggests that
“... students look at other blogs and they see the quality of work and

want to do the same thing with their work” (Gleeson, 2010). I know we want to implement this well within our school and this will require having weekly reflections together on how we are going, how we are progressing and what is working well. As it is new to us we need to consider how our own skills and prior knowledge will affect our implementation of this inquiry. 

I hope that students find writing more engaging and can be inspired to improve their writing by not only reading students writing within the school but also the cluster. Part of engaging the students is to see their parents and whanau viewing their learning on their blogs and commenting on it. It would be great to see this improve students learning not only in the classroom but beyond, so that students become life long learners.
However there are many factors that contribute to the success of blogging and google docs, students motivation, regular participation and parents understanding of what the students learning, simply using these tools does not mean we will improve students engagement and skills in their writing.


References

Gleeson, C. (2010). "What is the impact of the Manaiakalani Project on literacy teaching and learning?" 2008-2010 Final Report. Retrieved from http://www.manaiakalani.org/our-story/research-evaluation/2008---2010-final-report

Jay, J.K. and Johnson, K.L. (2002) Capturing complexity: a typology of reflective practice for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18, 73-85.

Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.

Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice: A brief overview of the concept and its uses. Retrieved from http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

Woodrich, M., Fan, Y. (2017). Google docs as a tool for collaborative writing in the middle school

classroom.  

Journal of Information Technology Education: Research. 16, 391-410. https://doi.org/10.28945/3870