Becoming an innovator in the EdTech field means finding and solving problems within our education environment. One of the problems that has been identified by not only myself, but by the team I am a part of in my educational institution is the lack of any tool that gives us the ability to properly track the progress of our students.
Our students, you see, are a bit non-traditional. We teach GED to incarcerated individuals, and a majority of those folks are forced by state law to attend their classes. As you might imagine, this creates a strange set of circumstances where some of the students are ready to take advantage of the situation and get their GED while others begin by being totally resistant to the idea.
Further, because we aimed at attaining that GED, we don’t have a whole lot of use for grades as any traditionally teacher would use them. Instead, as you’ll read in the artifact below, you’ll see that we have more of a need to track the perceived (or actual) intent of the student on a day-to-day basis.
Creating this artifact’s purpose is to describe the problem, show the required data points, and then discuss a solution as I would propose it. One of biggest challenges to creating this artifact was really deciding on what the minimum data needed is. While I’m sure it is likely to change before being put into production I believe that the data points are a good starting point for the project. I was also hoping that the solution would be more readily accessible, but after further discussion and research, I realized that it likely will require some outside assistance in the form of someone who can assist with the programming and design of the solution.
Shane Ede: My EDTECH Learning Log 