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.