Personal 4 - White-Black

				EdPsy 387 Computer Uses In Education Final Project Report Ling-Chun Liu

Description of Project

"Play Therapy" is an effective counseling approach, which is used very broadly to counsel children with behavioral or emotional problems. The web site--"OnLine Play Therapy Workshop" is designed for people who are interested in the issues of play therapy. It provides some basic principles about various therapeutic models of play therapy and related online resources. There are six sections in this web site.

1. Introduction: I address basic concept of play therapy in this section, such as the meanings of children's play, the meanings of play therapy and therapeutic components of play therapy.
2. Equipment: In this section, I provide some considerations about preparing the playroom and fundamental equipments for conducting play therapy. I also used digital camera to take some pictures to provide visual information.
3. Application: This section includes three components: the qualification of a certificated play therapist, the process to administrate play therapy, and the purposes of administrating play therapy.
4. Interaction: I use e-mail and guest book to discuss related issues and communicate with the readers.
5. Resource: This section provides some useful resources, such as links and reading.
6. Survey: This section is an online questionnaire to collect data for evaluating this web site.

Purpose of Project

Play therapy is an important and commonly used intervention for treating disturbance in childhood. However, parents, school teachers, even social workers, who are closely associated with children's welfare do not understand how play therapy may benefit a child. Thus, an important issue I would like to address is to educate people, who are working with children, the basic ideas about play therapy in order to promote the opportunities for children to benefit from play therapy.

On the other hand, because therapists with different approaches possess different philosophy, they may focus on different techniques and develop different intervention plans to conduct play therapy. Moreover, children's needs and abilities are different. Accordingly, a therapist should be considered these factors when he/she applies an intervention. In short, therapists' knowledge base about various play therapy models, techniques, and skills is critical for confronting children from diverse background and clinical population. The other purpose of this project, thus, is to provide important online resources, which can help a play therapist to expand his/her knowledge base.

According to above statements, the purposes of this project are summarized as following.
1. Create an online learning environment for people who are interested in knowing what is play therapy and what a play therapist does.
2. Share personal idea about issues related to play therapy with other people.
3. Collect and organize various information and resources about play therapy.

Survey Results

An online survey is conducted to collect the evaluation information about the content and design of this web site. The questionnaire consists 10 multiple-choice and 2 open-ended questions. The questions are as follow.

1. What is your current status?
2. Do you have any knowledge about the issue of "play therapy" before viewing this web site?
3. This web site is easy to navigate.
4. The layout of this web site is clear.
5. The content of the web site is well-organized.
6. The resources links the web site provides are useful.
7. The visualization is helpful for realizing the web site's information.
8. The information in this web site meets my needs.
9. The information in this web site is correct.
10. I acquire new knowledge about "play therapy" from this web site.
11. What do you like most about this web site?
12. What do you like least about this web site?

I sent e-mails with my web site's link to some of my friends and invited them to participate the survey. So far, fourteen participants complete the survey questionnaire. All of them are graduate students. Three participants said they have lots of knowledge about the related issues of play therapy before viewing the web site; eight participants said they only have a few knowledge, and the rest of three participants said they have no idea about this issue. The results of item 3 to item 12 are summarized as follow.

All of the participants agree this site is easy to navigate. Ten participants (71%) think the layout is clear. 86% of participants agree the content is well-organized. 79% of participants agree the resources links are useful. However, I did not use much visualization information in this web site. Therefore, only 50% of participants think the visualization assist them in realizing the web site's information. In addition, eight participants (57%) agree the information meets their needs. Nine participants (64%) of participants agree the information in this web site is correct, but the other five participants said they do not have idea about whether the information is correct. Only 57% of participants think they acquire new knowledge from this web site. As to the results of the last two open-ended questions, participants indicated the background color is cool; the content is concise; the photographs of sand tray are interesting; and they also suggest more resources are necessary; change the font color to make it easy for reading; translate the content into Chinese for friends in Taiwan.

Conclusion and Implication

I take the survey as a pilot study, which provide evaluation information to revise my web site' content and improve its quality. Based on the survey feedback, I think this is a good beginning for my web site. However, I have to incorporate more new information into this web site, and provide some description for the pictures in the equipment section. I may consider use some proper media components (such as animation, sound) to make it more interesting and attractive.

Currently, the most ideal implication of this web site is to use it as the introduction of a play therapy course or a children counseling course. It is suitable for beginning therapist and people such as parents and school teachers, who are interested in play therapy because this web site provides the most important information in the field of play therapy and is written in an easily understanding way. However, the information it includes is not sufficient now. In order to expand the usefulness and influence of this web site, further information collection is needed. Below I provide five possible directions, which this web site can be developed in the future.

1. To provide further explanation and information for each session.
2. To provide an episode of video to show a play therapy session or demonstrate the technique of using puppets in a play therapy session.
3. To provide case studies, which will enable beginning therapists to really understand what is play therapy and what a play therapist does in a session. They can also learn from other therapists' experiences to deal with problems they encounter in their sessions.
4. If there are play therapists willing to share or supervise beginning therapists to counsel children through play therapy, this web site can be designed as an online interaction web site. So beginning therapists can receive supervision from an expert who may live in another country.
5. This site can also be designed as a general interaction web site. Play therapists from different parts of the world can share their experiences with each other, receive support from each other, and exchange hot information related to play therapy in their countries.

Technology Used

CoffeeCup HTML Editor
Netscape Composer
Digital Camera

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