Wicked Problem Project

This was my first attempt at creating a Prezi presentation. You will see that I still have a lot of learning to do. When trying to Jing my Prezi, the zoom, window size, and transitions did not play as well as they did before the Jing. For some reason the transition slides didn't fit the screen well and the viewer ends up needing to adjust the sidebars up and down to view the images comfortably. I will gladly take suggestions about how to combine Jing and Prezi to flow evenly with each other.

Here is the script to my presentation:

Identify the Problem:

Last year I taught 5^th grade reading in an urban school district in Jacksonville, Florida. A wicked problem I had during my experience, was communicating everyday news and events to parents on a regular basis. There were two parts to this problem: The first, was that the information system I was required to use by my school was not exactly the easiest to navigate, nor very efficient. The second part of the problem was that parents had a difficult time navigating the site as well due to the “not so user friendly” interface, and that parents needed individual log ins and passwords to sign on.

Identify the Solution:

The solution I chose for this wicked problem, was to create a classroom blog. The blog would be an easy journal entry for me to complete at the end of each day’s worth of lessons. The blog could be shared as a link to parents (rather than as an individual log in) and could be made private to my classroom parents only. I believe communication between the school/teacher and home is important to student achievement because it starts the academic conversation at home. I see many benefits of using a blog to communicate with parents. The blog is compatible with many different venues of communication including text, photo, video, and podcasting. The Harvard Family Research Project investigates the impact of parent involvement on student achievement:

“The results of the meta-analysis indicate that parental involvement is associated with higher student achievement outcomes. These findings emerged consistently whether the outcome measures were grades, standardized test scores, or a variety of other measures, including teacher ratings."

The purpose of finding a solution to this wicked problem ultimately is to increase student achievement in my classroom. It has been proven by research that parent involvement is directly related to student success in the classroom. Getting parents on board with their students education needed to made fun and easy. A successful implementation project would be 90-100% of the parents in my classroom would utilize the blog and in order to take part of their children’s education.

The TPACK Framework:

In order to do this project successfully, I followed the TPACK framework. The TPACK framework models the strong intersection of technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge. When these 3 modes integrate with one another, student achievement is maximized.

Technology Knowledge:

The technology in my solution is a classroom blog. The blog would encourage students to get online and read the reminders of things going on in the classroom, look for excellent examples of showcased work, and watch videos of their group presentations. My strategy to pull parents deeper into the classroom and encourage students to be involved in that link as well is to make it easy and fun.

Pedagogy Knowledge:

This pedagogical strategy will make the content more accessible to students because it is an online showcase in review of what they are learning in the classroom. An e-version of the class per say. The blog will review concepts covered, homework and upcoming assignments, upcoming activities, and showcase exceptional student work. All aspects of the blog are created in order to strengthen the home connection. The increased parent communication will give parents the information they need in order to help their students succeed.

Content Knowledge:

The blog will make the content more intellectually accessible by giving parents and students a common ground to begin talking about what is being taught in the classroom. I will be able to post project guidelines for book reports, group projects, and presentations. The content of our classroom will be virtually accessible.

Implementation of Project:

The implementation of my blog was quite smooth. It was not as daunting as I predicted it would be and I had much success adding cool features such as a classroom calendar, videos, and a survey! Suggestions from my group members were to assist parents with setting up an RSS feed and also having a student guest blogger each week, to keep the class involved. These were wonderful suggestions I will definitely be adding to this project!

Findings and Implications:

All in all the project went through as planned. The blog was created and served it’s original purpose. I will not know if the project was truly successful until I can test it out on a live audience once I get my own classroom. There are so many possibilities the blog proposes with the student guest blogger, comments from parents, and future blogging activities I can do with my class. I would definitely recommend this project to other teachers, and my only advice would be to jump right in and don’t be afraid. The possibilities are endless!

Here is the Prezi:

Wicked Project on Prezi

Here is the Prezi with my Jing recording added.

Group Leadership Project

Our group decided to do our Group Leadership Project on using wiki's in the classroom. Our presentation defines what a wiki is, how to use it in the classroom, and also provides the benefits and disadvantages of using a wiki with your students. To create the presentation we followed several steps. First we used Google Docs to collaborate ideas and post our progress. A powerpoint presentation was created on Google Docs so we could all see how the presentation would be laid out. The script was also posted to Google Docs so everyone could edit and make changes or comments about specific areas of the presentation. A Jing tutorial was created and embedded into the powerpoint to show users how to create an educator wiki on wikispaces. The script was recorded using the Audacity sound program and finally uploaded to YouTube. These programs were all chosen by the assigned group member of each specific area of the project.

My role in this project was to create an example wiki, which provided tutorials to users on the different features wikispaces has to offer. I had never created a wiki prior to this project, only used them as a resource. In creating our example wiki, I learned how to upload videos, images, files, add a calendar, start a discussion, much more! The wiki has endless possibilities and wikispaces became very comfortable for me to navigate. I learned that the wiki was not such a daunting project and really was quite fun! I even learned how to add a voki to introduce our home page. Unfortunately, my work on this example wiki did not find much of a voice in our final presentation. After the project started rolling after our initial brainstorming discussion, the project seemed to shift more towards wiki's already readily available and showing users how to initially create a wiki in wikispaces. Because of time, space, and vision, the details of the actual wiki became lost. If I were to go back and do the project again, I would request that the group revisit our original vision of the project, which was to create an example wiki and teach users the features of wikispaces and uses in the classroom. In a project such as this where group members are hundreds of miles apart with vastly different schedules, it can be difficult to maintain a united vision. In our case, I believe the vision expanded to a more general view of wikis, rather than narrowing in on wikispaces. Despite this shift, I do believe our project still produced an excellent resource for learning about wiki use in the classroom. Creating a project like this requires teamwork and creative production techniques. Choreographing a script, powerpoint, and reading of a script by all different group members and roles was quite the task! It is easy to see how different interpretations of the project can be taken on by each group member, and therefore changing the original vision. In the end, a great project was created. Enjoy our video and check out the wiki I created too :)

Professional Learning Plan

To me, success is measured by the achievement of goals. Graduating high school, graduating college, landing that first job, supporting myself independently…. All goals set at one time and once met, became an achievement. Goal setting is necessary for our personal lives as well as professional. How do you know when you’ve MADE it?

A problem I have OFTEN encountered when setting my own goals, is setting them too high and absolutely unachievable. Then, when I don’t reach my goal, I become frustrated and down on myself. One goal I have for myself is setting reasonable goals on an achievable timetable. I guess you would call me an over-achiever because I always have so many projects going on at once. When I got my first teaching job in an urban school setting (a complete culture shock to me), I was also taking two courses in my Master’s program, as well as working part time at the company I left to take the teaching job. I was working 60-70 hours at school, 5-10 hours at the company, and about 10 hours a week on my online courses. These numbers naturally do not fit well together and if you add them up, you can see I was sleeping less than 5 hours a night and had NO life whatsoever. Prior to that schedule, I was working full time at a finance company (40hours/week), part time waitressing (20 hours/week), and also taking 2 online courses in my Master’s program (16 hours/week). Currently I have started a new job in wine sales (due to the fact that there are NO teaching positions in Michigan), taking 2 online courses, and tutoring a 1^st grader twice a week. For the last two years, I have been working 60+ hours a week, while going to school, and TRY to fit a personal life in there. My goal, after this semester, is to take ONE project at time, get really good at it, then move on to the next. I constantly feel like I’m failing, but I believe that is due to the fact that I take on too much at a time. How can I be successful at three different things, which require so much time for each? I guess I would call this the over-achiever dilemma.

Moving on from this course I will focus on the professional development of my new job as a wine sales rep. My job is 100% commission, so I need to be good at it in order to make money. There is so much for me to learn about the portfolio, regions of the world, accounts, and account management. It will take me another 2-3 months to really get a handle of what I’m doing. I want this to be my only focus until December. In January, once I feel as if I am achieving at a comfortable level with my job, I will begin taking my online courses again. Ideally I would like to finish my degree with the Rouen, France study abroad option. I began the Educational Technology program with the first study abroad group in the program, in Plymouth, England. It is my goal to be able to finish the program the same way. I will need to contact Michigan State to find out which classes I need to complete before the trip. My goal is to graduate from my Master’s program by next summer.

In the months from now until January, when I won’t be taking classes, I would like to review what I have learned in the program thus far. I will go back to readings and spend more time with them. In the midst of taking courses and working, I always feel too rushed to get my assignments done, and don’t absorb the material as much as I would like to. I want to spend some time at least once a week continuing my own professional development in the areas of educational technology, and all things teaching. In terms of skills I want to foster, I want to become an expert podcaster. Podcasting is my weakest area. I want to get better at creating and editing audio files, and making my content “podcastable”. I also want to work on my web design skills. Creating the wiki for my group leadership project, pushed my personal comfort zone in using wiki’s but I really enjoyed the learning process. I also want to work on making presentations using Prezi and Slideshare. In addition to these skills, I don’t want to forget about all the wonderful tools we learned about in the exploration of the data visualization lab. There are so many undiscovered tools I can’t wait to have the time to learn about and use.

When I think about literature and theory, there are two main areas I want to focus on. I want to read Robert Marzano’s The Art and Science of Teaching. There is an excellent website I found which provides resources for integrating technology, using Marzano’s highly effective teaching strategies. I want to explore these resources for future use in my classroom.

http://www.tltguide.ccsd.k12.co.us/instructional_tools/Strategies/Strategies.html

Lastly, I also want to read Teaching With Love & Logic written by Dr. Charles Fay. This book provides classroom management strategies to minimize discipline time and increase teaching time. One of my biggest struggles teaching in an urban school setting, was managing classroom behavior.

This course has helped me to become more reflective on my own professional development. The Wicked Problem Project helped me think about a true problem in my classroom and come up with a solution using technology. The problem I chose was communication with parents. I believe that the blog I created was an excellent solution to this problem. I also enjoyed working on our Leadership Technology project, which taught fellow colleagues how to create and utilize a wiki in the classroom. The wiki was something most of my group members were only a little bit familiar with, so we all became very comfortable in using a wiki through the assignment. I also look forward to seeing the projects other groups in our course created as well. Overall I feel as though this course was successful for me. The areas I struggled with was finding time to read and comment on my group members blogs. The blogs are all so wonderful and rich with ideas, it became hard for me to keep up with and write a significant response to four other’s blogs. Also, the podcasting blog post was a challenge. However, it pushed my comfort zone in podcasting to finally get it up there. My strengths in this course were the Wicked Problem Project, and the group Leadership Project. These two projects are where I felt I excelled and pushed my knowledge and thinking.

Mobile Technology in the Classroom

This is a very interesting topic to me. One that seems a bit taboo in the classroom, but I can definitely see the benefits. In a world where it seems that I myself send more text messages than talk on the phone, even to conduct business, I believe that using text messaging in the classroom would begin to prepare students for the really world. The problem is, that cell phones are banned in many schools. At the school I taught at in Florida, any electronic device that was found by a teacher was confiscated until a parent or guardian could come to pick it up. However if cell phones were used to facilitate an educational purpose, I believe the school could lift up on this rule. I created a poll for students to answer by text message at the following link:

http://www.polleverywhere.com/free_text_polls/LTEyMjYzODIxMA

The problem I foresee is that not every student will have a cell phone to participate in the poll. As the teacher, I would not want a student to feel "less worthy" in my classroom. Although you can also answer the poll via the website, or I could lend my own cell phone to a student without one to answer, I could still see where it might make a student feel left out. If the means are all there for each student I can see the benefits of using this technology, which renders instant results. The cell phones act like response clickers and give the teacher instant feedback on comprehension. The polls could be used as an exit ticket out of the classroom, and a reflection tool for the teacher to use to prepare for the next lesson.

Wordle

I learned about a great new data visualization tool called Wordle. You can add random words, phrases, and text into a box manually on the website or export text from a blog or delicious account into your Wordle. Such a great and awesome tool! Here's an example of what I made:

PART D: Findings and Implications

The implementation of my Wicked Problem Project proved to be successful. I was given good feedback and appreciate a parent’s point of view. The evidence of my success is in the ease the blog took me to prepare, and the future potential of the blog. I found that it would be quite useful to do a daily posting recapping the day’s worth of lessons. As suggested in my feedback on the blog, it would serve as a useful tool for absent students to check in on what they had missed. If I were to improve the project, I would also like to teach my parents how to subscribe to the RSS feed on the blog so they would receive the daily updates automatically. Some advice I would give to others who were approaching this project would be, “don’t be intimidated or overwhelmed by the project.” There are so many possibilities with the blog, yet they are so easy to conquer. One difficulty I had was uploading a podcast. This is something I would like to get better at so I could include more podcasts on my blog. Although, unfortunately I do not have my own classroom for this coming school year, I do plan to use a classroom blog in the future for communication with my parents. I would also like to get feedback from those parents about what they would like to see included on the blog throughout the year, and what they appreciate about it. Overall, I believe this was a successful project and I enjoyed pulling it together.

Part B- Storyboard and Script

Our group leadership project provides information and a tutorial on creating and using wiki's in the classroom. Our group has made excellent progress on this project. My part was to create a sample wiki. In this sample wiki I have included a voki introducing the site and how to guides on creating a voki, adding videos, a calendar, a survey, getting creative, and a discussion board. The wiki is a great springboard for others to see examples and brainstorm ideas for their own wiki. The wiki will be incorporated in our presentation and left as a tool. We have posted our script and presentation on Google docs. Click on the following links to read and hear all about it!

Script & Storyboard
Presentation
Audio