PART A: Description of Need or Opportunity

Wicked Problem Project:  Part A

In my six years as a teacher, I have noticed that the demands of this career have increased steadily over time.  Every year I am expected to complete more paperwork, address an increasing number of student needs, get more hours of training/education, communicate more thoroughly with parents, etc., while still accomplishing my regular daily teaching tasks.  Yet, while the demands on my time rapidly increase, the number of hours in a day remains the same. 
In other words, while the expectations of teachers grow constantly, we still have the same limited amount of time to accomplish these items while simultaneously lesson-planning, grading, learning from student data, and so on.   Thus, a major educational problem is that teachers lack time. 

Increasingly effective communication with parents/guardians and students is another key requirement of teachers.  However, making 200 phone calls daily is impossible and often weekly newsletters are problematic due to the ever-changing nature of lesson plans and the heightened demand on schools to cut back on paper and mailing costs.  

Parents/guardians and students generally want to know what is happening in our classes daily and, specifically, what homework or practice is expected of the student for that day or week.  In our district, “Homework Hotlinks”, or teacher websites that are basically snapshots of Word documents edited on a weekly basis, are the suggested solution to this problem. 

While the “Homework Hotlink” does provide a place for teachers to communicate with those at home about daily tasks, the format leaves much to be desired.  For one, teachers are limited to including only one week’s tasks at a time.  Also, teachers have to create new documents for each separate course that they teach.  When the daily plan is altered due to new developments in class or unexpected changes in the schedule (snow days, for example), this means the teacher has to then find time to edit the documents or leave them as-is, inaccurate and no longer useful.   This is a drain on time, provides limited information, and does not offer much in terms of interactivity/user-friendly format.

As a potential solution to the problems of teacher, parent/guardian, and student communication and the increasingly limited amount of time teachers have available to them, my colleague, Abbie, and I suggest the following: 

Abbie will train teachers on Weebly so that they can create their own websites easily and quickly--including separate pages within their sites for each course they teach.  Meanwhile I will teach them how to use Google Calendar.  Together we will show our colleagues how to embed customized links to their calendars on Weebly for each of their classes.  

Google Calendar will allow teachers to manage multiple courses simultaneously, quickly make adjustments when needed from any computer that has Internet access, show their entire year’s-worth of assignments, and, if they choose, divide the task of posting to Google Calendar among their department to easily collaborate, edit, and unify their lessons. 

We believe that this two-fold training will help save teachers time overall, allow them to easily share common tasks/plans for courses, and provide a more user-friendly, accessible, and interactive method of communicating with students and those at home.

We have already begun to implement this plan with five colleagues in our school.  This represents the beta-testing group of our initiative.  Based on how these teachers react and interact with Weebly and Google Calendar, we will then be able to plan a broader, building-wide training initiative.  It is our hope that those who are currently in training will then be able to assist others with trouble-shooting as they begin this process.   Ideally, by the end of this school year we will be able to train at least half of our staff (roughly 15 people) in these technologies.  Additional training could then take place during our summer/fall 2011 orientation to get everyone up-to-speed in time for the start of the next school year.  This would enable us to start the 2011-2012 school year with a fully renovated “Homework Hotlink” system in place that should prove more effective for all parties involved.

Also, in 2011-2012, students and parents/guardians could then be trained on Google Calendar so that they can easily click on a teacher’s calendar and have those tasks instantly embedded into their own, personal calendars.  If embraced by enough students, this fully integrated personal class/task calendar could essentially replace our current paper-based “Student Agenda” system (saving resources such as paper, printing costs, etc.) and enable students and those at home to see daily/weekly tasks at a glance with minimal extra effort required. 

On an even larger scale, we are hoping that our efforts in our building will prove effective enough that these same tools would be embraced district-wide so that a seamless system of communication would be present from building to building and from the classroom to district-level. 

Regardless of how much this training is able to be spread, we will consider this project successful if we are able to:  decrease the amount of time teachers spend in maintaining their class sites/calendars (Homework Hotlink), improve the communication that teachers have with parents/guardians and students, and alter the perception of our school’s Homework Hotlink system (i.e. users will note that the new system is more user-friendly, more useful overall, a better format in general, etc.).

The following are links to relevant research and resources regarding Google Calendar and its use as a communication tool for teachers specifically or in professional settings in general: 

PRINT SOURCES:

Adams, D. C. (2008). Gaga for Google in the Twenty-First Century Advanced Placement Language Classroom. The Clearing House, 82(2), 96-100. Heldref Publications. Retrieved from http://heldref.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.3200/TCHS.82.2.96-100

Claburn, Thomas. "New York Schools Get Google Apps Option." InformationWeek 1282 (2010): 22. General OneFile. Web. 5 Feb. 2011.  

http://0-find.galegroup.com.elibrary.mel.org/gps/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=IPS&docId=A239132571&source=gale&srcprod=ITOF&userGroupName=lom_accessmich&version=1.0

Feddern-Bekcan, Tanya. "Google Calendar." Journal of the Medical Library Association 96.4 (2008): 394+. Academic OneFile. Web. 5 Feb. 2011.

http://0-find.galegroup.com.elibrary.mel.org/gps/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&docType=IAC&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=IPS&docId=A200410211&userGroupName=lom_accessmich&version=1.0&searchType=BasicSearchForm&source=gale&infoPage=infoMarkPage

Hargadon, Steve. "Mind the time: busy? Online tools can help you manage that schedule." School Library Journal 55.6 (2009): 19. Educator's Reference Complete. Web. 5 Feb. 2011.

http://0-find.galegroup.com.elibrary.mel.org/gtx/infomark.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&docType=IAC&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=PROF&docId=A201711722&userGroupName=lom_accessmich&version=1.0&searchType=BasicSearchForm&source=gale&infoPage=infoMarkPage

WEB RESOURCES:

Online Calendars:  Virtual Schedules Help Busy Educators

http://www.edutopia.org/online-calendars

Google Calendar/Apps Pros & Cons (Collection of Links on a Wiki)
http://teachweb2.wikispaces.com/Google+Calendar
Gives links to articles that present strengths, weaknesses, challenges, Opportunities, Threats, and some examples of uses in the classroom.

Google Apps Education Training Center (EduTraining)
http://edutraining.googleapps.com/
Specific Module for Calendar
http://edutraining.googleapps.com/Training-Home/module-3-calendar

"Online Experiences"

Before reading the Michigan Merit Curriculum "Online Experience Guideline" (Companion document), I did not realize that the State had such a clear set of expectations regarding what qualifies as an "online experience" for our students and what does not. I also did not realize that there is a 20 hour requirement for these "experiences" and can't help but wonder how many students are actually achieving that goal.

One technology that is mentioned that I feel is highly useful for Spanish students is the podcast. Podcasts have so many applications in a language classroom, as they can provide great auditory experiences, visual learning, and can allow students to engage in self-driven learning or add to a lesson guided by the teacher. I often wish my students had additional opportunities to listen to native speakers and other fluent speakers besides myself because I believe that helps them get a better feel for the flow of the language overall. Podcasts would enable students to listen to other speakers as well as conversations in context.

I believe that podcasts can essentially help teach almost any Spanish content. Students can listen/watch a lesson on grammar points, practice vocabulary with listen/repeat formats, and gain cultural awareness through hearing podcasts of hispanic news updates or dialogues on key topics.

In my experience, podcasts are not only useful as modes of content delivery, they also are a fun, different way for students to demonstrate their knowledge or mastery of the subject. A few years ago, I had my students write and record "Spanish raps" in which they were teaching English speakers how to conjugate Spanish verbs in the present tense. They used the Apple program "GarageBand" to put their audio (including drums, bass lines, etc.) together, and simply saved them as "podcasts". I saw students' level of engagement increase substantially as they created projects that they knew could be shared over the Internet and downloaded to their mp3 players. Also, students could then recall and use the class raps to remind them of the conjugations.

Pedagogically, podcasts can provide scaffolding--guiding students through lessons. They also allow for cooperative learning in the case of projects like the one I mentioned. They enable educators to assume the role of a "guide on the side", where students are working with the content through the podcast and the teacher provides supporting structure, questions, etc.

I think blogs, although I love them, would be harder to use with my students. While on one hand students familiarity with web-based profiles, etc. could be useful in blogging, I also feel it could jeopardize their safety. What I mean is that students are used to sharing information through media such as Facebook and generally do not censor themselves much. Students might feel that same amount of "freedom" on a blog and share too much information, inappropriate information, etc. I also feel that blogs would be hard to monitor on a large scale with only one adult to keep track of them. 150 blogs to follow would mean a huge amount of time checking on student posts, monitoring for appropriateness, etc. They might work with a smaller group and may be more easy to use with older students (e.g. 12th graders rather than 9th) who might be less tempted to abuse the privilege.