PART D - Findings and Implications

A solution is sometimes perceived as the piece that is missing to complete something, the last few words in a crossword puzzle or perhaps the missing sock from the last load of laundry. We cannot help but feel complete and have a sense of achievement when we finally put it all together. This is the feeling I am experiencing with my WPP. After much planning, trial, error, and countless sessions in front of a computer, I have been able to design, create and deploy a website solution for the health course that required a web presence for students to work on. Along with the help in direction, vision and suggestions of the wonderful teachers and administrators I work with, we were able to create a place where students could not only carry out their research and publish it, but also develop and challenge their technical skills. We approached this solution with focus on students gaining knowledge about their mental health and wellness topics through research compiled within their groups. With collaboration in mind, we saw the web as a great opportunity to further expand their communication skills, to present them a digital canvas on which they could play around with and display their findings.

Implementing this platform was both challenging and inspiring. The first order of business was to find a tool that would be able to support multiple groups of students at various times, and different paces. Once I decided Google Sites would be able to offer us a flexible and reliable platform, we began designing how the site would work, and what it would look like. All the while we maintained a focus on how the students would be able to approach the site with familiarity and intrigue. As we took a look at the hard copy, the traditional form, of their research assignment, we worked on how these prompts would translate onto our digital canvas. Creating the structure from which the students would build upon was very important from the start. I found that creating the table of contents links with the prompts allowed the students to have an easy way to navigate through their sections and find the right place for their information and multimedia. Having this as a standard for each page made it very easy and convenient to work with and for the different groups of students. Even when there were absent students from groups, they could reconvene to where they had left off and follow along their progress with the familiar look and feel of the site. Adding and removing students from the project site was very easy and made it possible for me to efficiently manage who had write permissions. It also gave me the ability to maintain accountability for the work that was being done, and what modifications had been made. This is a feature the teachers really appreciated because they could monitor who had done what, and when they had done it.
As the project progressed, Google Sites offered a great level of scalability by allowing growth to be possible in both content and group rotations. The implementation of this project would have been possible with another web tool, but I found that using Google Sites gave us the ability to manage, deploy, and create with great functionality.

The success of this project can be measured in multiple forms, how engaged the students were with their topic, how well they used the tools provided, and what skills they developed and practiced throughout their work together. While the dynamics of each group vary by personalities and character, each one showed a level of interaction and engagement with each other and the content, that made using this platform a great example as to why , well planned and implemented, web technologies can augment to the importance and success of a well structured lesson. The foundation to a great experience with technology is rooted at the heart of a great lesson plan. Was it not for the great work that the group of teachers put into their lesson, I would not have been able to help transfer their incredible vision onto a digital version of their efforts. As students worked together, asked questions, and maintained a high level on interest in learning about their topics and the technology they were using, we felt that this had become a wonderful alternative and solution. Some students took advantage of the tool outside of class and asked if they could also work on their site from home, of course they could and did!

In our approach to this project we took a look at the lesson first, the objective, and what we wanted the students to walk away with. These were achieved as the project progressed, but one hurtle we met halfway was how to archive these projects or how to roll over with ease and efficiency. At first I had thought that templates would be the best solution, but what about the work created by previous rotations? Copying and transferring sites became a solution for this. If we were to create a similar project for another class, this is something I would need to keep in mind to address it accordingly. The rotations in this course are fairly common, so it would be unusual to see such a quick turn around in other courses, but it is still something that would need to be addressed from the start.
Working with multimedia, embedded or attached, is something that I might need to plan ahead for as well. While we wanted to have students add media to their projects, we also needed to allow them access to sites that are usually filtered by our content filter schedule. This was not a big issue, but it is something I will keep in mind to modify our filter properly to allow students access to YouTube or image hosts for them to access content.

For a different afternoon course I had to add another section that did not have similar structure to the previously created pages. This project is different from the morning course because at this point the teacher wants to allow the students to create brochures and post them instead of in form of a research questionnaire. This presented a great opportunity to use the platform differently, just as Glogster acts as a platform to create digital posters, I plan on using this Google site as a place where the students can upload or embed their brochures. While at this moment the brochures are not yet done, I look forward to blending these multiple technologies, desktop publishing and web technologies, to help create their web-brochures. This is yet another great example of how flexible and scalable this platform has been for this course, something that I will keep in mind the next time a teacher needs to do something similar.