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Effective Use of Technology In the Classroom?
postermmxvicom writes "I remember in college I had one professor who, in addition to being a great teacher, really took advantage of the technology in the classroom to illustrate the concepts for Calculus and Linear Algebra. Well, now I am the teacher. I teach Algebra, AP Calculus, and Physics in high school. This year I have gotten a tablet and a wireless projector. Now I can write on my tablet instead of the board, as well as use other applications. I want to utilize this tech effectively for teaching. Would you please share how you have seen technology effectively used for Math and Physics — either specific software or how that software was used (specific or general)?"
It is a interative screen-whiteboard with real-world physics. It's kinda hard to describe without a movie.
If my experience in High School still applies (and maybe it doesn't; it was a long time ago) you're going to turn out the lights to use that fancy gizno and half the class is going straight to sleep, the other half is going to be passing notes and shooting spitwads and paper airplanes around.
I suggest you compliment the technology there with a pair of night-vision goggles or something.
I think a major mistake teachers make is to discover new teaching technology and then invent a curriculum that uses them. This gets the process entirely backwards. If you try this, you're going to sacrifice learning in the interest of playing with your new toys.
... "this would work better if I can use my new gizmo." This is where the technology comes in. First find the problem, then find the solution.
You've got these new tools. That's great. Now forget about them. Design your lessons as you would. As you go, you're going to realize
So, what is the problem with a blackboard? Be precise.
Then, look at whether the technology will solve that/those problem(s). We're talking math here. Is the technology going to allow you to better explain some difficult concepts or will the focus end up being on the technology?
Blackboards work because blackboards always work. They don't need to be rebooted.
One way the tablet is better than a blackboard is that you can save a written copy of your lecture, and make copies available to the students. That way they can spend their time paying attention to the lecture, instead of rushing to copy everything down. This can make the class more interactive.
The PC can be used, in general, to demo the physics and calculus principles through animation. It can be a useful teaching tool, just don't let it replace the hands on activities usually done in the lab portions of the course. Sometimes doing is better than seeing.
PowerPoint is very useful if the person using that tool uses it correctly. Unfortunately, most people use it incorrectly and write down every single thing that they're planning on saying on a slide. If you're going to do that, students will catch on and just think that they can get by with printing off the notes and skipping class because listening to the teacher will not help them understand the material any better. The catch is, they won't understand it at all. Active learning helps people learn and remember facts and concepts way better than passive reading or listening. That's why the best way to use PowerPoint is as a guide or outline to what you're going to talk about. It forces people to use more than one sense to take everything in, and if they want notes on everything important from the lecture, they have to write it down themselves and actually comprehend it in the first place.
If you don't know how you're going to use it to meet your classroom goals, maybe you should be asking yourself why you intend to use it at all.
"Because it's there" doesn't seem like a good reason for introducing technology into the classroom.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well powerpoint is the only thing usefull, my teachers ever used.
Invest in some old fashioned hardware. Hands-on physics teaches a lot of concepts to those who don't quite grasp concepts published in a book. Examples are a bicycle to teach force/displacement/speed relationships. The classic is standing a bike up and asking if the pedal low to the floor is pushed to the rear of the bike, will the cranking force move the bike foreward or will the gearing cause the bike to move backwards in the direction of the force and why?
Students that grasp these concepts early on are the ones to understand the conservation of energy and entropy. They will understand why you can't use a high speed motor of say 1 HP to drive a 1 KW generator fast enough to power the motor and have a few hundred watts of power left over. An electrical load on the generator provides a mechanical load to the motor. This is not over unity creating a perpertual motion machine.
Props such as a hand cranked generator or bicycle driven generator that can be loaded make a serious impression to early students. Cranking 60 watts is work. 300 Watts sustained is very serious work. This leads to an understang of torque/speed/horsepower relationships. Torque or speed is not power. Feeling power generation is better than most any PowerPoint presentation.
After the mechanical presentations, then go into lecture and detail such as going over an electric bill and figuring the typical days power use and how much work is delivered for a dollar.
Power economy and the hand cranked PC scale now come into view. Hand cranking your typical home PC or laptop and Monitor are now seen as beyond pratical. Energy conservation to fit the hand cranked energy budget now become a prime design consideration for future engineers instead of how to hand crank existing tech.
Hand cranking a 2 watt laptop is possible as well as a 60 watt laptop, but the 60 watt laptop isn't pratical as all the time will be spent cranking quite hard.
You were cheated in your physics class if they didn't do the blowgun/falling ball demo or used air hocky tables to show center of mass of spinning objects and conservation of momentium, elastic and inelastic collisions. In the 1970's we shot a lot of film of this on an air hocky table and took measurements from the photographs to calculate displacement of the objects photographed under a strobe light. The hands on stuff was the best.
The truth shall set you free!
I find it stunning (and disturbing) that there is this notion that adding tech to the classroom is by default beneficial. This idea is complete rubbish and the studies are starting to mount that show this (see below). Especially when it comes to the hard sciences and mathematics. We know that 'dead poets society' ruined a generation of english teachers. IMO, technology is ruining a generation (or more) of science/math teachers.
/never/ seen it used properly) that they actually seriously detract from the class. In fact, people tend to do the exactly same nonsense with powerpoint that they do with the chalkboard i.e. write what they say. Yes, I can read, tell me/write on the board something I can't.
/. archives for the links). The conclusions were that all this tech actually largely prevents learning because the kids are distracted by all the "shiny objects" rather than actually paying attention to the content.
I've seen exactly ZERO tech used in class beyond an overhead that was anywhere near effective whether high-school or beyond. Hell, even when I taught *C++* I used the white-board a significant chunk of the time. Also, in high-school, that cover of darkness can prove to be a bad choice.
Powerpoint (and similar products) are so poorly used (I've actually
There have also been studies on using tech with kids (look through
So, my suggestion is to put away all of you expensive toys (that are proving to be less and less effective as time goes on), pick up a piece of chalk and actually teach them. After all, when it comes to Math and Science, all you need is quick sketches to get the ideas across, now don't you.
I'm both enthusiastic as well as sceptical (and wrote and talked about it [PDF]). Here are some major points for me:
Chalk and board. Plus some props to demonstrate stuff. Seriously, computers don't _really_ help students really understand stuff.
Physics? Nothing beats a good 'ol number of balls, rods, ramps, tubes etc etc in demonstrating how stuff works. Watching virtual cars colliding on the screen doesn't really make students appreciate the nature of momentum and conservation of energy.
Chemistry? How does using some 3D software showing off molecules really compare to a good 'ol titration in the lab?
Biology? Disecting a rat just beats reading about rat morphology any day.
Mathematics? Take the students down to the beach and measure waves. Their height, period, variation in shape, speed etc.
Computers and other technology is useful for analysing and summarising the data, but get the students out of the classroom to gather the data.