PART A - Description of Need or Opportunity

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

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.

I envision using technology to reach my visual and auditory learners. The human attention getting shorter as we become bombarded with new forms of media. Technology has affected the way we learn. Information can be accessed relatively easy from any Internet connected computer, cell phone or mobile device. Arguments over content based standards loose merit becoming less relevant as we shift from thinking about what we teach and instead think about how and why we teach it

We no longer teach from a single text from start to finish. Students are diverse and have different learning styles and needs.
concise bits of information. Visual learners

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.

One of the many benefits of technology in the classroom is it gives students a way to guide their learning. Students can learn to become independent learners. Web based applications like Youtube, Tumblr, and Flikr have more use than just being a social network. These applications have a valuable place in the 21st century classroom.

Gone are the days of having a static, one size fits all curriculum. If a picture is worth a 1000 words then a portfolio of work students create through the semester should be worth volumes. Learning can happen in thoughts, concepts and pictures.

Photo blogs like Tumblr.com could be used as a digital portfolio for students to track concepts earned. Kinestetic learners could benefit from creating skits, fake news reports or other videos and upload them to Youtube.com. Audio learners can benefit from podcasts and audio sharing websites.

Logistics of solution: For example… What is the scope? (e.g., when and where will tool be used and for how long? Who all will use it?)

I envision this being an ongoing activity where students can track their learning through their own Tumblr or Youtube account. As long as students log in for 15 - 20 minutes one or two times a week this should be sufficient. As homework students could write a paragraph or two about the significance of the photo. For example, students might be asked to analyze a photograph for a current event assignment or create a venn diagram and post it on Tumblr.com

This could be a project that lasts throughout the semester. I envision this being something of an ongoing activity where I have students guide and track their learning.

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:

The results of your search (What resources may help guide your project? What resources may help in the implementation of your project?)
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 good websites on how website like Tumblr and Flickr can be used in the classroom. Two of these articles I have read are an “Introduction to Using Tumblr in the Classroom” by Ave Maria Press and an article by Edtech on “How to Use Flickr in Your Classroom.” I found both articles relevant and a balanced view of the positives and negatives of using this new technology in the classroom. As soon as I get access to J-STOR I will find a few published articles on this topic.

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

I plan on implementing this into my courses in the next month. I will start by using pictures for my opening “Do Now” activity to start the class. The goal would be to build students comprehension skills and have them understand how to properly analyze a photograph. I will obviously need to work with my students both as a class and individually to demonstrate how to use these websites and to create their own accounts and familiarize them with the basic features.

I would ideally like to build this idea out to where students create their own visual portfolio to document their work.