PART A: Description of Need or Opportunity

1. What is the important educational need that you are seeking to address? This element is fundamental in this project. Since we have limited time, energy, and resources, cool technology without a clear sense of why it matters or what we gain by it is of little value in the educational setting.

 Last year during October there was a severe flooding situation in Bangkok, and we had to close school for about six days. At that time, we had to use our school’s website to create as much e-learning opportunities for our students as possible. In addition to this, at our school, students often miss classes due to involvements in athletics and/or other extra-curricular activities. Providing students with opportunities for e-lessons is becoming more of a necessity than an option at this point.

2. How you plan to address this educational issue with technology?  You need to make a clear and convincing case that your proposed solution will make a real impact on the issue you identify, and that your proposed approach is a reasonable approach given its costs and possible alternatives.

Using the internet and various technologies available is definitely the best way for me to address this educational issue. My plan is to create on-line lessons for the Algebra 1 course that I will be teaching during the next school year. Each lesson will include some form of review/notes of the skills that are needed to be successful in learning the lesson, some type of teaching video and/or screencast in which the lesson will be delivered, an interactive activity such as StAIR for students to confirm their understanding of the lesson and practice the skills they are being taught, as well as additional modeling and practice resources that can be posted through the internet. I am still contemplating whether to create my own site for the course or to post the lessons on our school’s site which is called Panthernet. I am leaning towards using Panthernet simply because it is managed by the school’s Education Technology team, and they usually take care of the technology problems that come up. Whereas if I use my own website and it does not work during an emergency situation, I would not know where to go for assistance.

3. Logistics of solution: For example… 

a. What is the scope? (e.g., when and where will tool be used and for how long? Who all will use it?  

There is definitely a very wide scope for this tool. It can be used by all students taking the course. In fact, it can be used by students in any math course who need some algebra review. Once it is set up, this tool can be visited by students over and over again for learning, reviewing, and/or reinforcements. 

4.   Relevant research and resources (from the Internet and elsewhere) including reports on the closest effort you can find to what you are planning to do as well as ideas and materials you may be able to build upon in your own effort.  Your description should include: 

a. The results of your search (What resources may help guide your project? What resources may help in the implementation of your project?) 

b. What you learned from performing this search. For example, which search engines did you use? What strategies did you use? What helped or hindered your search? How would you search again next time?                                                                                               

I intend on using a lot of the resources and tools that were introduced and taught in CEP 810 and CEP 811, and that will be used in CEP 812. Youtube and Khan’s Academy are two of the various resources for teaching and learning math that are available on the internet. I realise, however, that I would need to carefully watch the videos and select the one that will support the mathematics, concepts, and learning methods that I am focusing on in the classroom. It is crucial to pick the “right” video and not just “any” video. I will also be creating screencasts and/or videos of "teaching the specific lessons." The curricular resources that I plan to use will come from my school's course curriculum to ensure that it ties in to my course.

While performing these researches, I realized that doing this well needs time and clearly defined goals. There is so much available on the web that we, as teachers, may not need to "reinvent the wheel." However, it is important that we carefully select and only use what we are specifically searching for if we want to make our point clear and our learners focused on the concepts/topics/ideas that we are teaching. It also means that we may need to add our personal resources in the form of videos/podcasts/screencasts to link all the technology tools that we employ.

5. A plan for the portion you will implement during this course and the portion you will implement after this course completes.

 During this course, I am hoping to create e-lessons for the first two lessons of the Algebra 1 course. After creating these two, I plan to continue with as many lessons as I can during the school year itself. I am hoping that they will get somewhat easier after I have gone through the first couple of e-lessons and taken care of the basic technology glitches that accompany most of these kinds of technological implementations.

I intend to post these lessons on the school site as soon as school starts in August to allow students to have access to them as early as possible.

6. How would you know you were successful?

I will know if this works, how well it works, and how I can make improvements on it, once my students have access to these lessons, start using them, and providing me with feedback on them. If more than 50% of the students access the lessons and the resources, and spend quality time going through the various tools, I would think that I am off to a good start. This should be sometime in August and early September.

 

Session 1: Performance Task/Podcasting Lab/Post to Blog

To listen to my podcast, please click here.

CEP 812: Session 1 - Video Bio

Please click below to view my Personal Introductions for the CEP 812 course. 


Personal Introduction by Seema Goghar

CEP 811 Final Reflections

During these past eight weeks while taking the CEP 811 course, I was introduced to several new technologies and teaching tools, was able to enhance my understanding of the new researches in learning and teaching, and was able to create some useful web-based technology resources  that are relevant to my teaching.

The most important thing that was made evident in this course is that in teaching today's learners who are growing up in a web-connected and technology based world, it is absolutely essential for educators to adapt/adjust teaching methods and ways of lesson delivery to match up to their ways of learning. To effectively integrate technology in teaching a lesson, teachers must first have clearly defined lesson plans. The Instructional Design Principles that were defined and explained in Session 1 described the basic principles of creating an effective lesson plan. After defining the basic principles, technology is then incorporated into the individual parts of the lesson plan as appropriate. The four areas that should be addressed for a technology rich lesson are motivation, socialization, audience, and technology needs. The technology aspect is the teaching tool that is used to accomplish the goal of the lesson. If used appropriately, it can turn out to motivate and engage today's learners in a very effective manner. Other than having a well-defined lesson plan, it is also essential for teachers to learn and understand the various types of technologies that are available and that can be used effectively in the classroom. The Universal Design for Learning is an extremely powerful framework that focuses on teaching strategies that are expected to reach all learners. According to this structure, teachers should attempt to use multiple ways of representation, actions and expressions, and engagement in their teaching. Technology plays a very significant role in being able to successfully use this framework. Overall, to effectively teach when integrating technology, educators must select the technology tool that is appropriate to the lesson, have a thorough understanding of what the tool can provide, and incorporate it an organized and well-planned lesson.

Integrating web based technologies adds a new dimension to the idea of technology usage. To begin with, there needs to be an understanding that everything that is done web-based can be accessed by others. This alone requires you to be more careful about what you post and how you post it. This course introduced us to some basic formats and designs/colors that work better than others. Secondly, it can be extremely powerful as a communication tool. Learning can now take place anywhere that an internet connection is available. Learning is not exclusively done in the classroom anymore. What this means, at the same time, is that educators now have to learn how to teach in a web-based platform. This involves creating web-based resources, such as a webquest or a stand-alone instruction resource. Both these resources, if designed well, can be extremely powerful teaching tools and can provide multiple ways of presenting a lesson. Students who need to take more time for understanding, or who need several reinforcements before being able to clearly grasp concepts, can now do so at their own time outside of the classroom. It also allows lesson delivery to take place in a different format, and students are no more simply dependent on understanding the lecture in the classroom. Being a member of MERLOT allowed us have access to teaching materials created by other educators. We were able to evaluate resources on it and submit some of our work to be used and reviewed by others as well. Now   before we actually create a technology based teaching resource, we can have look at MERLOT to see if others have done something that we may be able to use.

I think I was able to accomplish more than what I had thought I would. I actually created my own class webpage. That is pretty amazing! I have also become more familiar with some of the tools I was introduced to in CEP 810.  The most valuable part of this course for me was creating my own StAIR. The process was frustrating and took a lot of time, but in the end I felt it was something that I could immediately use in my teaching as a web-based resource for my students. I will be taking the next course CEP 812 Applying Educational Technology to Practice. I am hoping to extend my learning in this next course and to continue implementing some of these educational  practices into my lessons.