holoEdu

holoEdu

holoEdu; solution description.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the proposed solution for the 2018 Hawai’i Annual Coding Challenge for the State of Hawaii Department of Education challenge, Equitable Access to Education. The proposed solution is holoEdu; unified education.

Focus Statement: Currently U.S. Spends $18 Billion in teacher professional and development costs; networking and training. Hawai’i teachers alone will spend $4-6 million annually for classroom resources. The focus for this challenge was to design and create an interactive collaborative platform that enables teachers, communities, and supporters to allocate resources in an economical and efficient solution to allow equitable access to education for Hawai’i students so they are engaged in classrooms to compete in the global market and transform Hawai’i into a world class innovation destination.

Customer: The direct customer holoEdu will be serving are the teachers. Indirect customers who will be able to use the platform are community (school staff and parents) and supporters (local entities that have an interest in supporting teachers)

Solution: holoEdu is an online platform designed unique to teachers to meet their needs. Using the internet, holoEdu will connect teachers across different demographics, community, and supporters in the following way: I. Profile – holoEdu will allow teachers to have a professional (LinkedIN style) page a. Profile page will include key specific demographics, bio, credentials, and interests. b. Profile page will include teacher lesson plans. Teachers will have the option to post their lesson plans on their page to all the community and supporters to see and discuss the best practices for education. c. Profile page will include an education section. This education section will allow teachers to market themselves and incite furthering education. This section will include a repository of certified education credentialing resources.

II. Groups – HoloEdu will give its users the ability to create groups: a. Own groups (invitation only) b. Join a group (non-invitation) c. Match groups. holoEdu will give recommendations to teachers, community, supporters to form groups based on key variables such as demographics or grade level.

III. Communication – holoEdu’s platform will have an integrated chat bot. a. Teachers will be able to communicate inside the platform and not have to worry about using email. b. Teachers, community, and supporters will also be able to:  Follow pages (class subject, education reform ideas, new teaching methods, etc)  Feed page. Similar to Facebook, for a quick reference on the user’s interests, groups, discussions, and notifications.  Resource page. This page will include a repository of available resources, allow users to share/redistribute resources, and crowdfund. IV. Incite – holoEdu will incorporate gamification characteristics to incite users to the platform. a. Activity. Points will be based on login, messages, sharing files, getting a file rated, rating a shared file, creating a group, donating. b. Badges/Titles. Badges will be based on groups, file sharing, file rating, login streak, leaderboards, connections, activity points, donations. c. Leaderboards. Leaderboards will be displayed based on top 10, top rated lesson plan, donations. Leaderboards reset every month. Past leaderboards can be viewed up to 3 months. holoEdu can easily be deployed using existing databases from the Department of Education. holoEdu is a sustainable platform that can be integrated in any location. holoEdu will unify the education ecosystem to efficiently allocate resources and share best practices.

Name and Logo Description: Name: I. holoEdu stands for unified education. The h is lowercase because in programming the first letter in a concatenation is camelCase. Holo comes from a Greek word. Logo; Drawing Compass: I. Drawing compass is often associated with education II. Drawing – signifies that the solution is never fixed and can always be improved; inspires imagination III. Compass – a symbol for guidance. Also serves as a way of saying to the customer (teachers), there are many ideas out in other countries and cultures in regards to education that can be applied to their home origin. IV. Circle – signifies unity.