Wicked Problem Project: Part A - Description of Need or Opportunity

1. What is the important educational need that you want to address?

The important educational need that I am seeking to address is the need for students to work collaboratively together with various classwork and projects. Students need to learn the life skills of cooperation and collaboration from a young age, as they are skills they will need for the rest of their lives. As with all teachers, I strive to have creative opportunities for students to work together. Many times this would include discussing things together or working together to create a project. While I enjoy these group work activities, I would love to see alternative ways for my students to work together. In many cases, using technology in the classroom causes students to work individually, whether that be at a computer or at their desks. While learning and using technology to further academic knowledge is a great goal, I would like to see technology used with group work in the classroom. My ideal goal is for students to work together in a way that allows them to be completely dependent upon each other to complete the project. Students will need to learn the technology and learn to work in a group while demonstrating or learning academic content.


2. How you plan to address this educational issue with technology?

In order to demonstrate students working collaboratively in a group using technology, I would plan a unit in which students take all of the information they have learned in a content unit or multiple content units and create a short "TV show" about the information. Depending on the content of the project, the TV show could take different formats. For non-fiction content, it could be a news broadcast or a documentary or something similar. For fiction content, they could create a sit-com, a music video, a movie, or something similar. I would prefer to give the student groups the ability to choose their method of relaying the information learned. The intent with this project is to get all the group members involved in the planning and processing of each step. They first need to collaborate on the information they have learned in the unit, then determine what they want to focus on, and work together to come up with an appropriate way to convey the content. Studies have shown that when technology is involved with education, student motivation increases. This is my intent with this project. Students have learned the information in the unit, now they can show what they have learned through creative, technological, collaborative avenues. They must work together to complete the project and part of the design is to work through the difficulties of working in a group.


3. Logistics of solution:

Before even beginning this project with students, I need to make sure my guidelines and expectations are clear. Students need to know what I am looking for and what the purpose of the project is. For me, the purpose is to assess the learning of a unit or units and to use technology as a collaborative group to show what learning happened. For this project, each group will need access to a video recorder and potentially more technology as they decide what they will do. To include other technologies, and so I can keep track of what they are planning, I would have each group record electronically their brainstorming and development of their plan as they discuss and decide things. This record could take the form of a word document, wiki, google doc, or blog. As the project continues to get underway, each group would utilize the video camera to record the information they are presenting and then edit the video using an editing program such as iMovie or Microsoft Movie Maker. In order to be of best help, I would need to familiarize myself with the video editing software they use, to show the whole class the basics and let them figure out the tricks of the program as individual groups. In all, I would anticipate this project taking at least 2 weeks of class time, possibly more.

4. Relevant research and resources:

As I have thought about this problem, I first reflected on my own classroom experience. From the lessons I have taught, it seems that student engagement increases when students are working together, especially on a long-term project. I have also noticed, though I have no data to support my assumption, that students remember the content from group projects longer than information from individual learning. According to Susan Stras and Joseph McGrath in Journal of Applied Psychology, "as group tasks pose greater requirements for member interdependence, communication media that transmit more social context cues will foster group performance and satisfaction." In other words, as a task requires students to collaborate and work together more, technology with a great amount of communication capabilities should be used. This article also stated that groups who are able to communicate face-to-face were more productive than groups that met online. Also, Anuradha A. Gokhale, in the Journal of Technology Education researched collaborative learning environments. The study found that, "if the purpose of instruction is to enhance critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, then collaborative learning is more beneficial" than individual learning. This further supports my desire to use technology with collaborative learning and group work. Students would have face-to-face time to interact during class and their critical-thinking and problem-solving skills would be enhanced from working in such a collaborative group.


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, implementation is rather difficult because I am currently not teaching. To prepare me to implement this lesson during the next school year, the best thing I can do is familiarize myself with video editing programs. Editing will be a large component of the project and many students will not be familiar with how to use the software. I can also think over what units would be ideal to use a video project like this to conclude a unit or several units. The purpose of the project is varied. On one hand, it is to assess a unit or several units, to have students demonstrate the knowledge they learned instead of taking a paper and pencil test. On the other hand, it is to have students work collaboratively while using technology. Instead of having students use technology individually, I want them to work together and depend on each other for the success of the project. After this course will come the actual implementation of the entire project. I would have students complete the entire project and let them reflect on it to give me feedback.


6. How would you know you were successful?

I would know I was successful if the students were able to produce quality videos that clearly show the learning that occurred in the unit/units. I would also be able to informally evaluate the collaboration and participation level of each group as I watched throughout the process. If all group members are working together equally, learning new technologies and being heard, then I would consider it a success. If one or more members are slacking off while others take the lead, it would not be as successful to me. The student evaluations would also be a clue of the success of the project. If students note that they were working collaboratively and produced a quality video, then I would consider the project a success.