Friday, January 25, 2013
Chapter 4 Reflection
Chapter 4 looks deeper into involvement, motivation, and development in new approaches to education. Initially the author recommends having students introduce teachers to new technology, a clever and effective suggestion. The author goes one to discuss the relevance and importance of collaboration between educators and parents with suggestions like websites and video projects as a means of facilitating this. Further, the author expresses the importance of real world connections of lessons to life. One example was using Skype to advance a lesson on globalization. In addition, the author talks about using these real world connections to help motivate students. Having the high school freshman generate a police report based on raw data from law enforcement and their own calculations was a novel recommendation for engagement.
I see some overlap between the recommendations and my personal experience. The collaboration is actually something we are currently focusing on with the educational outreach I do. We are setting up the website, lesson plans and other documents, and generating demonstration videos to aid other educators interested in using our activities. I have also been looking over many similar videos and sites that have been set up by others to augment what we currently have.
I was also interested in the line on page 68 about technology requiring human input to operate. In my undergraduate education a professor described computers as devices that can do work a million times faster than humans, but only with the right input. If you use the wrong information the computer becomes a device that makes mistakes a million times faster than humans. I found it refreshing to see the sentiment in the chapter.
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I think this is a great idea! It will help answer the one question I get all the time from my students, "when will I ever use this in my life?" (chemistry) If their were more sites like the one you are in the process of making, it would help teachers answer with, "well here is what the physics or chemistry departement at OU is up to!" I think that would be a great way to get more young people interested in science and math at a younger age.
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear it, I shall keep you posted on the materials as we get them in place. Not everything can be connected easily to everyday life, but you can also get coverage for that with making it a bit more accessible and cool. Hands on works great for that if you can. Or even just approximating hands on (for esoteric stuff). Once we used balloons to demonstrate the expansion of the universe. I also shall have some videos for older age groups showing some of the high powered equipment we use for science.
DeleteThere is a saying in computer science .. Garbage in and garbage out.. and that is what he is talking about.. The author went on talk about digital literacy.. having students understanding literacy.. This is part of the ISTE standards for students - http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-students.. (which all students should have achieved by the end of the high school)..
ReplyDeleteA lot people argue that digital literacy is the most important - because students are kind of gullible.. I would agree with that.. It reminds me of our calculator arguments as a chemistry teacher - should you allow them to use calculators - the thing was kids would put in numbers and have no idea what the answer should be.. so we need to work on similar estimation skills - for students - can you judge if this seems plausible or do we need to check it against other information triangulation.
Your phrasing of digital literacy seems to be encompassed in critical thinking. There are more subtle nuances of course, like reputability of the source and so forth, but they are all connected I think. I definitely support advancing that in the classroom as much as possible.
DeleteOne thing I enjoyed (though have forgotten and need to look it up) was a professor in math showing us a lot of the old techniques used before the calculator age. He gave us a simple formula that helps compute square roots with repeated iterations. It converges pretty quickly too. I really appreciated those things and they helped me foster thinking about the numbers and methods of manipulating them rather than just numbers for answers.
It is important for parents to become involved with their children's education by becoming more familiar with technology. Parents collaborating with their children at home is just as important as teachers collaborating with their students at school. It is important in general for the parents to become involved with their children's education, therefore the better understanding they have of technology, the better their children will adapt to the new learning environment taking place in today's world.
ReplyDeleteI agree wholeheartedly. Further, even beyond direct involvement parents can help just by showing an attitude of interest in the material. Children learn by parents actions. I was helping my niece with her homework and pointed out to my sister that she was also indirectly helping as a parent by doing her own homework from college courses. Just the example of children seeing their parents do homework (whoever it belongs to) demonstrates that the adults value it. All the better if it the child's work or new technologies and education.
DeleteIf classrooms are going to seek partnerships and input from professionals, professionals (especially in technical fields) are going to have to learn how to communicate their passion in ways that teachers and students can understand.
ReplyDeleteI think this realization may be coming to fruition... the National Science Foundation has a Communicating Science workshop it takes to universities and research institutions, the Center for Communicating Science is trying to help others build similar programs within their colleges, and challenges to explain complex ideas to children, dance your dissertation, and explain your research using only the 100 most common words abound.
How do you think this communication push is affecting professional scientists? Will communicating with the public continue to be relegated to outreach programs or will increased abilities to connect with the public through the internet change the language of science?
That can be a tough one to answer. I only have the limited view from inside my own area, but often scientist can be so busy it is hard for them to reach out. Many do, but in small and intermittent ways. And often motivated by their children (like going to their kids classes to talk etc).
DeleteOne thing that might also be a very good avenue to setting up better communication between scientists and educators are Research Experience for Teachers (RETs). We have had a number of high school teachers come and work on science in the summer. It gives them a chance to see beyond the veil and often they are better at adjusting the knowledge to the level of their classes. It also gets personal connection to scientists which makes collaboration easier.