Page 12 - The Inquiry into the Development and Implementation of a Multimedia Resource to Help Improve Parental Involvement in Their Child’s Reading Literacy During the Primary School Years.

quantitative data collection methods which I will discuss in detail in Chapter 4. I

hope to stay true to my beliefs and values of creativity, collaboration and excellence
throughout this action research enquiry.

1.3 Rationale for this Study

I decided to choose this area of research for a number of reasons. The initial idea

came about during my conversations with the parents of our school during our
parent-teacher meetings. I observed a significant increase in the number of parents

asking me to recommend educational websites and eLearning applications they
could use to assist with their child’s homework. The majority of these parents felt

that they did not have the necessary knowledge and tools to effectively assist with

their child’s school work, particularly the parents with children in the senior classes.
I recommended some educational websites and apps, however, I was always quite

reluctant as the teaching methods used in these websites often differed from what we

taught in our school, and this had the potential to cause even more confusion for both
the parent and child. The inspiration to start creating our own eLearning resources,

tailor made for the specific needs of our parents and pupils, arose from these
conversations and the growing demand. This need for change was further

highlighted when I employed the NCTE’s (National Centre for Technology in
Education) eLearning Roadmap, 2009 (Figure 1.1) to measure the eLearning status

of our school. This eLearning roadmap is a planning tool designed by the PDST

(Professional Services for Teachers Development) to help schools identify where
they currently lay in relation to their eLearning status. It was evident that we as a

school needed to make some progressive changes by improving our communication
methods within our school community, primarily by sharing eLearning resources and

best practice examples with the parents and pupils. To accomplish this goal, we
needed to make the resources available online to the school community outside the

regular school hours. Although we had attempted to provide some information

resources online, such as our current reading resource ‘Reading With Your Child at
Home’, available from the Parent and Pupil Handbook; it was clear we had to

reintroduce a more innovate and effective resource. See (Appendix A) for the

‘Reading With Your Child at Home’ document.

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