Progress Report on Final Project

Prior to the previous class meeting in EDM310, I was clueless as to what I should do for my final project, but during this mandatory class meeting I developed an understanding about what I would do. Each semester in EDM310 Dr. Strange assigns his students various children’s blogs that they are to comment on, but this semester he decided to join the World Blogging Challenge. Through the World Blogging Challenge Dr. Strange's students would comment on one child’s blog for three consecutive weeks. In the last class meeting Dr. Strange addressed the issues that he had encountered while participating in the World Blogging Challenge. The biggest problem that he encountered was the minimum amount of blog posts that these children were publishing, and Dr. Strange asked his class' opinion about how he should address this issue. The lack of blogging reflects largely upon the educator’s view of blogging, and Dr. Strange's second question was, “how can we motivate the educators to blog more often, and how can we get them to motivate their students to blog more often?”.

My suggestion was that EDM310 students should create a motivational video to illustrate to educators the benefit of incorporating various types of technologies in the classroom. Creating this video is the very thing that I plan to do for the final project, and the best way to achieve this goal is by involving a group of people who are as passionate about education I am!!! I am extremely excited that my group (Scholars United) was willing to help me create this video. The video will start and end with a narrator who will discuss the goal of the video. Each member of Scholars United will pick a subject that he or she will teach in the future, and will determine which technologies will best enhance their lesson plan. So far, each member of Scholars United has selected their own subject to address, and each member has selected different technologies that could enhance student comprehension. This final project will be centered around the idea of motivating educators to incorporate technology in their classrooms, and to make known the connection between technology and student comprehension.

I see too many videos in EDM310 that are stationary and lecture biased, but my goal is to utilize: various classrooms, the green screen, several smart-boards, and several people. We are not planning to create a normal video, but rather an extraordinary video that will inform and motivate educators to rethink their teaching approach. Through motivated educators will come motivated students.