Technology Integration Plan

Click here to access my Technology Integration Plan for a unit on Newton’s Laws of Motion.

The Access portion of the Integration Plan primarily focuses on how new topics will be delivered by lecture. The first strategy, direct teaching, can be supplemented with a PowerPoint presentation to present bullet points, highlight key terms, and provide visual aids for certain concepts, both in diagrams and videos. Internet access will most likely be necessary to utilize video resources. The classroom discussion and problem solving time can take advantage of a Smart Board coupled with online demos and virtual labs. This can allow volunteer students to manipulate simulations in front of their classmates to help me illustrate concepts and demonstrate certain phenomena and relationships. Students will also be shown how to access other online simulations and will be given worksheets to help them explore several of them on their own.

All of these strategies and tools for the Access portion are to support NJCCCS science standards for refining concept knowledge with new evidence(5.1.12.C.1), and to begin to introduce the concepts behind Newton’s second law, F = m A (5.2.12.E.4). The addition of the technological components supports NETS-S standards 1.C, using models and systems, and 6.B, finding and using applications in an effective and productive manner.

The Analyze segment delves more deeply into how I will have my students take the information from lecture and begin to deepen their understanding of the concepts through problem-solving. Like the lecture, much of the in-class problem-solving time will be guided by me with questions and diagrams displayed on the SmartBoard. Students will need their calculators to help them quickly convert mass into weight and find cosine and sine values of the components of angled force vectors. For homework, the students will still have their calculators, but can also clarify instructions or receive the actual assignments and clarifications through an online student portal. Finally, within the context of a laboratory scenario, students can make use of available probe sensor devices to get more accurate and straightforward measurements in motion and freefall labs.

The strategies are to support the science standards 5.1.12.B.2 and 5.2.12.E.3 - the scientific practice of using mathematical tools and technology and new uses and interpretations of Newton’s first law, motion only changes with the presence of a force. The technology integration allows fulfillment of NETS-S 1.A and 3.D, where students apply existing knowledge to generate new work or techniques, and process data and report results.

I will have several methods for assessment. For these lessons, I will be grading homework and keeping track of results with simple in-class formative assessments. I can utilize Microsoft Excel to keep track of the results of the simpler assessments, which can quickly aid me in identifying gaps in knowledge. This can apply to certain groups or perhaps represent a larger misconception by the majority of the class. Students can also assess their own work and in certain cases apply for a chance to revise their work, identifying what the misconception was that led them to incorrect answers or explanations. The online student portal will allow them to keep track of the grades their work is earning them and help motivate them to buy in to their own success. This reinforces both the science standard 5.1.12.C.2 and NETS-S 4.D standard which encourage the revision of work and prior thought patterns, and the pursuit of alternate solutions. Science standard 5.1.12.D.2, which calls for excellence in reading and writing to express the student’s scientific thinking patterns, is satisfied through this process as well. More examples of assessment will be discussed in the Production portion at the end.

Like many science classes, the physics classroom is a great opportunity to encourage collaboration and communication. Labs in particular are a great way to develop the skills for teamwork, as they will always be a group endeavor. Beyond using tools like Microsoft Word and Excel to neatly write up results, answer questions and organize data, students can use modern online tools to efficiently manage the project. Google docs in particular makes it incredibly simple for all students to instantly access all the resources and collaborate in its assembly. Social media and other means of electronic communication, like text messaging or chat, can also assist the students in communicating about their objectives and allow for opportunities for everyone to participate from the comfort of their own homes. The collaborative skills that are developed through this align with Science Standard 5.1.12.D.1 and NETS-S 5.B.

Finally, the lessons will also incorporate opportunities for students to produce work to express the depth of their understanding of the relationships we’ve learned about. This can be demonstrated via written work in answering open ended and free-response items, verbal responses to questions and also through the solving of some of the higher-order problems. Opportunities like this will be given through informal discussion during class time, through homework questions, and, of course, quizzes and exams. Small projects and presentations can also be used to demonstrate a concept, such as a student or group of students doing a demo. With all of these, Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint can  be used as a medium to organize, support and/or deliver proper demonstration of the student’s thought processes. A variety of internet resources can also be used by the student to clarify his or her understanding of the subject or to research when gaps in knowledge need to be filled. Proper and mature usage of these resources fulfills NETS-S standard 3.B, which says that students are expected to be able to locate, organize, evaluate, synthesize and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media. Science standard 5.1.12.A.2 also sets the expectation that students should be able to interpret and manipulate evidence-based models to build and critique their arguments and explanations. 

Math, Science, History, unraveling the mystery that all started with...

Whenever I tell people that I study physics, the Big Bang Theory almost always comes up at some point. Three of the main characters are physicists and fill every possible geek/nerd stereotype one could imagine – they embed science analogies in their conversations, have regular trips to the comic book store and attend comic-con, and are among the most socially oblivious creatures that roam the world.

I wonder how familiar my students might be with the show – obviously some of the content is more mature, but nothing the average high schooler wouldn’t be watching. If I deemed it appropriate for the class, perhaps using occasional clips before leading into certain lessons would be really effective! Even at the beginning of the year, I could use this clip from season 3 to transition into my personal introduction to the course, reassuring that I won’t be teaching them anything like Sheldon would:

          Sheldon teaching physics

Although a great deal of their discussions revolve around highly advanced topics in quantum physics, a lot of the references they make as asides can be understood by someone who’s taken a high school-level physics course. For my students, this may make them feel as if they’re in on an inside joke. I might even want to assign extra credit projects where they pick references from the Big Bang Theory or other shows and make a presentation to their classmates, pretending that they were explaining the joke to a bunch of friends who didn’t get it. 

Caution with implementation

I have a lot of concerns about certain technology being a good investment, especially trendy (read: pricey) devices like iPads. I get just as excited as everyone else about having a fully equipped modern classroom with a SmartBoard and enough computers, but I think this stems from the greedy nature that comes along with growing up in an entitled consumerist society.

Most of us want to ensure that we have all the ‘tech necessities’ in our lives – a smartphone, high speed wireless internet at home, a big enough hi-def enough tv, the devices that make our HDTV prove that it’s HD, etcetera, etcetera. I think that we as teachers have that same mentality about our classroom – that we, and of COURSE our students, need and deserve the very best. Otherwise, how are we to educate in the very best manner? (Sarcasm intended)

When we put more thought into it, it becomes obvious that we do not need to set our classrooms up with one top of the line fully loaded 17” MacBook Pro and iPad 3 for each student. Nor can we really afford to go to the opposite extreme and have our students trying to do 21^st century work on computers running Windows ’95, or even worse, fail to have our students learn to be tech savvy in the first place. So the real question is, “how do we find the best balance when it comes to equipping our schools with modern enough technology on a sensible budget?” To answer this, we’ll need to have proper research and evaluations behind how well different technologies support learning. 

As Larry Cuban points out, the research approach needs a lot of improvement and schools have to be willing to trust the data:

          New Technology in Schools : Does it Work?

The article is a quick read, but be sure to hit both parts of it. I’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions – if better research showed that a lot of classroom technologies have little to no impact on learning, how would that hit you?

Some thoughts on video gaming

A few years ago I was a manager for several different GameStop stores. When I decided to make a big career shift and move into teaching, one regret I had was that the vast majority of the experience and skills that I had built up to be a successful and marketable retail store manager wouldn’t really carry over. But upon reflecting on my experiences in different stores, it hit me that I have a fairly good insight into areas that almost all American students have an enormous interest in – not just video games, but music and movies as well.

For video games, it’s important to acknowledge that they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. There is a very large gender gap when gauging students’ interest in electronic gaming, although more and more girls have found gaming approachable and accessible in the past five or ten years. Systems like the Wii and Nintendo DS and the growing popularity of simple mobile games have brought in tons of demographics that would never have been interested in gaming in the 16-bit days.

What I’ve found most fascinating about the gaps in interest in video gaming is that there’s virtually no difference in interest across different socioeconomic groups. Attainability of the most modern gaming machines and the newest software may be different, but you’ll find no shortage of students in Newark who love playing their Playstation 2 systems as much as more affluent suburban students who own every up-to-date console available. A shared interest like this seems very rare to me, it doesn’t seem very likely that children with such starkly different backgrounds and cultures would universally love video games. So if a vast majority of our students are so into gaming, why is it so hard to come up with ways to use this interest to engage our students’ learning?

It could be that educational software is simply unwelcome on these platforms. Consoles like Leapster are a rare case of a perfectly effective educational video game experience, but only because all the hardware and software is exclusively focused on that purpose. Furthermore, the target audience is for a fairly young age, and as it carries no other entertainment purposes, other home and handheld consoles become more desirable as the child grows older.

When the DS first came out, Nintendo began exploring ways to incorporate educational software and came out with some great titles like Brain Age, Personal Trainer: Math, and Learn Science. Brain Age in particular was a huge commercial success and got a lot of parents to reconsider the value of allowing their children to spend time playing video games. To a certain extent, though, the presence and success of the games may have been based around naive purchases. In my experience, the vast majority of the copies of educational software we sold were purchased as gifts by the parents or relatives but rarely or never put to good use. Lots of children immediately traded the software in to buy more engaging games, and the general impression I got was that the only benefit of having educational software was that Nintendo made their products more marketable by claiming they had better intentions for the kids using their systems.

Despite the inherent difficulty in merging the worlds of electronic entertainment and education, I feel that there’s something important to our students’ ever-growing interest in video gaming. I’m not sure how I would go about tying in this interest my students may have into my classroom – I’m certain that engaging the students as a class with games would be ineffective, but in certain one-on-one scenarios perhaps I can use a particular student’s interest in games to motivate learning. In my case, this may be finding out what kind of game they’re into and having them analyze how certain physics properties were programmed into the game’s engines or perhaps having them find moments in the game where the physics don’t actually make sense.

In the end, regardless of how any of us may feel about gaming, we have to face facts - we're all going to have students who love them. How would you go about engaging a student who has no interest in your class but loves playing Halo? 

Setting the bar for accountability

          Social Media in the Physics Classroom

Above is a link to Stephanie Chasteen's 'Social Media in the Physics Classroom'. The vast majority of her insights and observations apply to all content areas, so it's definitely worth a look even if you're not teaching science!
In several of my prior posts I've pointed out my concerns about the distractions and disruptions many technologies bring into the classroom. Chasteen quickly addresses many of the same concerns I've had, but points out that a teacher who constantly discourages the usage of technology ("lids down time) does the student a disservice. She does a great job pointing out effective ways to use various social media tools to shape your students' learning, but the biggest thing I took home from this was the advice to have accountability - having a wiki-based contract and encouraging buy-in from the students. If I can find a way to make this more effective, I'll not only be free to use a huge amount of online resources with the fill trust of the kids, but I'll also be shaping them into responsible technology users at a very early age.

Double Slit Experiment simplified

The concept of the double slit interference pattern was something that baffled me at several points in both my high school and collegiate physics courses. I remember doing labs on this and having the feeling that the concept WOULD be something important to understand but I just never connected the dots and was able to visualize the phenomena and what went into it.
Truth be told, I think this is an example of a whole slew of concepts that a lot of physics professors 'get' themselves but have a hard time passing on the visualization and importance on to their students. In high school, something like this may be glossed over - which makes the introduction almost pointless. The very premise of the wave-particle duality is one of the most fascinating aspects you can address when describing electromagnetic waves, and yet it's all too easy to either go over your students' heads or underestimate their ability to grasp the concept. In all honesty, how many of you scratched your heads and/or yawned whenever the terms 'double slit', 'interference pattern' and 'wave-particle duality' came up? That's what I thought.
Well, thanks to our friend Dr. Quantum, even those of you who hated physics and struggled with it can get a powerful visual for not only how the experiment works, but WHY it's so dang crucial to both the study of electromagnetic waves and quantum physics:

          Dr. Quantum - Double Slit Experiment

Although I won't need to go into the quantum aspect of this video too much in my class, it's going to be immensely helpful when I talk about the light wave version. The animation alone with the highlighted interference on the waves simplified and clarified a concept that I used to be rather puzzled about. This gets added to the list of go-to videos along with Bill Nye!

Science jam, key of Curium

Early on in my observations, I noticed some of the 7^th and 8^th grade science teachers using a very strange method in their classes. Every once in awhile a big announcement would come up – that in a few days, lyric sheets would be passed out, and the students would all get to sing a song about the science topic they were covering.

Yep... songs… 

...singalong songs… 

...about science...

...to the melody of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’... 

...couldn't make it up if I tried.

And you know what? The kids absolutely ate it right up. The very announcement sent them into a frenzy, and the students eagerly anticipated the upcoming lesson that contained this delightful treat. They would bristle with energy and excitement, and sing out songs about the rock cycle and elements at the top of their lungs. Self-conscious as tweenagers are, not a single one of them wanted to miss the chance to join in on these songs.

So in the oddest implementation of technology yet, I plan on tinkering around in GarageBand next semester during my student teaching with my 8^th graders. Writing up some MIDI-based tracks should be a piece of cake, and if my students are into rap, I’m sure I can drop some beats for them. I highly doubt I’ll get a chance to do this with high school students later on, but there is NO way I’m going to pass up a chance to utilize music in my science class, especially seeing how insanely enthusiastic all the middle school students at this school were about the idea. 

P.S. The symbol for the element Curium is Cm ... C minor... terrible science gag of the day, complete!

Never enough restrictions?

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/53910819-79/ipad-apple-ipads-students.html.csp

For all the effort and great intentions that go into new technologies to be used in the classroom, it’s a shame that there’s no way to overcome students’ natural abilities to uncover EVERY distraction they can find. Apparently even the mighty Apple can’t quite counter these tendencies, as the article above reveals. As simple as they make it to disable and restrict all dangerous or unproductive apps and websites, students quickly found out that using iMessage can’t be blocked in any way!

Such a small loophole now means that usage of already purchased iPads will have to be severely restricted and monitored, and in many cases would prevent districts from purchasing iPads. The risk for cheating or even just unnecessary chit-chat outweighs the possible benefits of implementing all the educational tools an iPad can bring to the table. Apple clearly wants to be marketable and have the iPad be the tablet of choice for the classroom, so it probably won’t be long before a proper set of tools are released to ensure that this won’t be a problem any longer.

The real shame in all of this is that lower and lower attention spans are the source of both the need of new technology and the risk of implementation. The reason that devices like laptops and iPads hold so much potential is because students overuse them recreationally and are, quite frankly, bored when engaging technology isn’t present. Then, given the tiniest opportunity to exploit distracting and entertaining non-educational aspects of the technology, students unravel the devices and ruin what could have been the engaging classroom experience they needed.

I personally think there should be more emphasis on encouraging maturity in the utilization of technology at an early age. In the market, devices seem to generate the most appeal (even for adults) in the potential they hold for keeping us far, far away from boredom , and it’s no surprise that all of us are now programmed to be distracted and entertained at every moment of the day. When we have a class full of children or teenagers who are wired this way, it's not fair for us to try to master the balance of giving them enough tech to stay engaged and restricting the access they have to avoid distraction.

What can we do as educators to overcome this and hold our students to higher standards of behavior and maturity?