Part A - Description of Need or Opportunity

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.

The educational need I need to address within my classroom, and something that my school is seeking to address, is the use of one-to-one technologies.  Within our district, in the very near future, all students will be receiving an Ipad to use within the educational setting, and as a math teacher, I need to find out how I am going to incorporate this into my classroom, everyday lessons, and possible future hybrid classes.

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.

For this project, I plan to search specifically for some sort of application that would allow me to connect my lessons to my students outside of the classroom.  I would like to be able to record lessons, whether they be mini lessons for extra help, or access to allow me to easily transition into a flipped classroom within my math class.  I am hoping that this application would help for the future plans to use within a hybrid class.  Since this is a lot to take on at once, I will focus more on the usefulness and educational purposes within my classroom.  I would like to find ways to incorporate the iPad as an educational tool and have resources for my students to use them properly and not just as a 'game' tool or for 'twitter.' If I happen to find a math application along the way, something as small as a free graphing calculator that the students could use on a daily basis, or a math simulation of some sort, that would be an extra bonus. With this search and information being so overwhelming, I hope to find at least one main source for daily life of lesson/lectures to use within my every day planning and then at least one useful educational application to use with my students. I hope to find useful technology within an Ipad to share with my department and my colleagues to ease the transition of such a technological shift.  With the use of my ipad and research, I hope to make a real impact on the usefulness and adaptations of such technology within our school.

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?)

The Ipad will be used daily within all classes, starting in January.  Teachers will have access to their technology this summer to learn, use and play with in order to incorporate into their daily lives.   (luckily I have early access since I have my own MacBook and Ipad)

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?

There are many articles and resources both supporting and not supporting the incorporation of Ipads within the educational settings.   Since this is something that will be implemented, I have decided to look more on the positive side of the usefulness of such implementation.  Resources such as idea, lessons, apps, and articles are things that will help my project and my implementation in the future.  One of the great resources that has been shared with me is:http://appsineducation.blogspot.com/  This is a great resource to find some of the 'classroom' resources to use and allow for my students to get a useful and educational purpose with the iPad.  This resource directs you to specific apps for specific purposes within the classroom and could be useful in finding resources to use on a daily basis. Throughout the year, our principal has sent us many articles dealing with different technologies, and lately a lot more dealing with Ipads.  This is something that I have found useful to look at since we are moving in that direction.  One of his articles that I found interesting was: http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2012/05/goclass-create-and-deliver-lessons-on.html?m=1 I found it informative that there are so many blogs out there that offer free resources and apps to use within your classroom and this blog features an app called "GoClass" that I would like to look further into. Another resource shared with me that I will be researching further is: http://ipadsatburley.blogspot.com/  I really enjoy reading this blog because this is a journey of a teachers 'adventure' using iPads within the classroom.  I think it is comforting to be researching at teacher that is diving into the adventures of iPads and seeing her journey and how she would tweak, improve, and add to her classroom lessens and projects by what she has learned along the way!  One of the blogs on there that caught my eye and made me do more research about was about the video lessons like 'ShowMe.'  I looked further into this application and realized how easy it was to use and how useful it would be within my every day classroom.  This is one of the applications that I will surely take with me into my daily classroom in the future! There are many searches that find a lot of results dealing with Ipads, and a lot dealing specifically with education.  However, since the Ipad is still fairly new, this is still something that people are learning and improving on daily within their schools.

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

I plan to find technologies that will help me easily communicate with my students, show examples, record lessons etc.  That is something that I will focus on for this course.  After that, I will focus more on how I am going to implement these technologies usefully within my every day classroom.  I believe this will be a bigger hill to climb, so this is something I hope to continue to work on over the summer.

6.     How would you know you were successful?

I think any little bit of use I can find for daily help, lesson, etc. will count as a success. This is a new adventure for my district and me and I believe that any move in the positive useful direction is going to be helpful!  I hope to solidify a few resources that I will use on a daily basis, either lesson planning or implementing lessons to make this a successful transition!