The plan

Our first step in the action plan was to create a wiki. The aim of the wiki was to communicate our ideas about the action research, share resources and readings that we found useful or that may help us create a framework for our project. During the Summer School there was some discussion, in workshops, that suggested that some teachers of English still resist the notion that integrating technology within our subject area is, or should be, a mandatory part of our subject. There was much discussion about the different technologies used within each of our classrooms and the range of those technologies was growing, in fact, burgeoning!

There were several things that needed to be considered in this project including that we

* use different syllabus documents
* work in different systems
* work with different age groups
* the cultures of our schools are markedly different

This is a concern with regards to equity in education. Technology comes at a cost. The price of software licences in schools can be prohibitive for poor, small schools. The new roll out of hardware, under the Rudd Government, suggests that the equity issues will be addressed but the notion that every student can access the internet easily and freely from both school and home is erroneous.

During our project we shared many things. The most obvious was that the time it took to implement action research in our school and report on it was onerous to say the least. We also shared the panic of presenting our findings. There was an overriding sense that as teachers we were overstepping our boundaries and venturing into the world of academia. It also became obvious that when discussing different syllabuses that there wasn't a common language for us to share between states. In terms of encroaching national curriculums this is a major problem.

Notions of virtual classrooms, discussion boards, the different ways we construct texts in our classrooms as teachers, how we deliver our teaching material, and the ways we instruct students about creating multi-modal texts using ICTs, all presented fertile sharing fields.