Wicked Problem Project-Part A

PART A: The Wicked Problem - A Need or an 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.

As a child, I remember my parents asking me “What did you do in school today?”  As a parent, I ask my child the same question.  The answers I gave to my parents are similar to the answers my son gives me such as “Nothing” or “I played outside”.  This is an issue many parents face with their children every day.  How can we communicate with parents better?  Newsletters are great but they often get lost in the backpack or misplaced at home.  Over this past spring break, I had the opportunity to be a camp counselor.  This summer, I will be a lead camp counselor and one of my responsibilities will be to come up with ideas for activities to go along with each week’s theme.  How great would it be to ask parents for ideas and advice?  Wouldn’t it be nice to reflect on each day and inform parents of the next day’s activities?  Currently I am a substitute teacher all over Ingham County.  Since I am in different classrooms at different schools for one day at a time it would be difficult for me to implement a solution to this educational need as a teacher.  Luckily, in a couple weeks summer camp will begin and I think this would be a good comparison to how well it would work in a classroom.  In fact, this is great timing because now would be a great time for me to start informing parents of what summer camp is all about!

2. How do 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.

I plan to create a summer camp website using www.weebly.com.  On this website I will include camp counselor introductions, weekly topics, a calendar, contact information, camp rules, items campers need to bring each day, and most importantly a blog.  Each day one of the camp counselors will write a blog about what the campers did that day as well as comments for the next day.  Pictures will be included throughout the week.  This will allow parents to become familiar with everything they need to know about camp.  It will also give them a chance to respond to blogs, ask questions, and share ideas.  Weebly allows you to create your own website for free so there will be no cost.  Other technology that will be needed is a computer with the internet to access Weebly from and a digital camera or a phone with a camera and the internet to take and download pictures from.  This is a reasonable approach because most people have access to the internet and once our Weebly page is set up it will not be time consuming to write a blog each day, download pictures, and make any updates needed.  An alternative could be to give parents our email addresses but that would be more difficult to them because they couldn’t just “respond” to a blog.  Parents would also not be able to see pictures of their children throughout the week.  The summer camp website can also be edited as needed throughout the summer depending on the needs of the campers and their parents.  I will know that my approach is successful by offering a survey to the parents. Each month, I will post a link to a survey that I make using SurveyMonkey. Each survey will ask the parents questions about how satisfied they are with different aspects of camp. It will also allow them an opportunity to offer input on what we can improve on in the future as well as leave any additional comments they want.

3. Logistics of solution: For example…

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

The summer camp website will be used by the counselors every day when they blog about the day.  Parents can check the website or respond to the blogs as needed.  The counselors will also post pictures of campers and activities throughout the week.  The website will be used all summer.  Anyone can use it including counselors, campers, parents, and anyone else who wants to check it out.

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:

1. The results of your search (What resources may help guide your project? What resources may help in the implementation of your project?)
2. 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?

In order to find relevant research and resources about my topic, I used google’s search engine and typed “classroom websites with blogs”.  I found a great website titled “How to Create Websites and Student Blogs using Weebly”  It gave three good reasons to use Weebly: It’s free, it has no adds, and you can create your own domain name for free.  Another resource I found is a pinterest page titled “Teacher and Classroom websites and blogs”. This included several examples of classroom blogs and a few classroom websites.  I will use this as a guide while creating my website and writing my blogs.  The last website I found is a presentation titled “Blogging and Classroom Websites”. This presentation was very informative.  It included instructions to starting a classroom website and how to get your students blogging, and examples of classroom websites.  This will help me get started and give me some ideas for my website and blogs.

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 plan to create my website and write an introduction blog.  I will include the topics for each week of camp.  After this course I will continue to add to the website pictures, blogs, and notes to parents.