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)?"

MIT has a cool device

[fmobus]

It is a interative screen-whiteboard with real-world physics. It's kinda hard to describe without a movie. [youtube.com]

Clickers

[cuantar]

The physics department at my university has started using "clickers." They are small handheld devices resembling calculators that students can use to wirelessly answer multiple-choice questions an instructor poses via e.g. a slide on a presentation. After everyone answers the question and the timer ticks down to zero, the instructor can display a histogram of counts/answer.

Individual devices are tied to students in that only one id number is allowed per device, so these are also useful for taking attendence in large classes. Students enter their id upon connecting to the instructor's master node at the beginning of the class. Their utility for teaching depends largely on the questions the instructor asks, of course. If two answers receive similar amounts of support from students, individuals could be called on to explain their reasoning, helping the instructor to highlight where their weaknesses in understanding lie.

The devices are sort of a mixed blessing. I found that the best problems for them were those with two very similar answers that differed only conceptually, rather than mathematically.

Here's a link to one kind of clicker that's being used this semester (XP software via Parallels on OS X :) http://telr.osu.edu/clickers/ [osu.edu] (I am not affiliated with OSU at this time)

sparsley

[bishop32x]

The problem with most of the technology is that it gives information too fast for most students. It's easy to whip up a whole bunch of slides, or pre-made note-sheets for a document camera, but it's much harder for the students to follow. When you're doing things on the board (I guess a tablet pc and a projector might work here) it's much easier to understand step by step process, particularly in derivations, when the instructor is speaking and writing every step of the way. In terms of tablets versus blackboards, blackboards generally allow you to keep more information in front of your students for longer, but feel free to ignore this if the geometry of your space limits blackboard space.

The other mistake that many of my tech-savvy instructors (both high-school teachers and professors)have made is distributing copies of your notes. It sounds like a good way of making sure all of your students gets all of the information, but it completly eliminates the need to take notes in class or even pay attention to what you're saying.

Nice question; some ideas

[xPsi]

As a physics professor, I often find myself asking the same kind of question. Sadly, I'm way behind you with your tablet and wireless projector, but you are definitely inspiring me with that kind of gear. Here are a few ideas:

I try to use Mythbusters sub-episodes every so often as teaching tools. As most of us know, it's pretty entertaining and, while a little too seat-of-your-pants to serve as rigorous science, it definitely captures the scientific spirit and frequently inspires teachers and students alike. We'll typically watch some part of an episode, discuss the principles involved in the myth, and try and do some calculation related to the episode (e.g. number of ping pong balls to lift a boat off the bottom of the bay, terminal velocity of a penny, etc.). With your setup, you can nicely embed the parts of the video into a presentation then use the tablet to lead a real-time discussion of various topics of interest. As you probably know, there are many nice physics videos out there which can be used in this way. I also can suggest using a nice plotting calculator with your setup to quickly demonstrate ideas like Taylor expansion, Fourier decomposition, basic plotting, etc.

There is some software available out there that will analyze video motion using basic mechanics tools (CM motion, rotational motion, vectors, motion diagrams, position versus time, etc.). You give it a few anchor points on the real video capture and can step it through the motion but with all the vectors and graphs superimposed. Although it is a cool idea, sadly, the version I tried was old quite clumsy (made more clumsy by the laptop/AV setup). However, with your tablet and wireless, you may have more versatility if updated software exists.

There are several intriguing student grading/evaluation systems out there that use bar codes (for example, here [barcodeclass.com]). I know at a glance this sounds rather sinister and 1984-ish, but with student-customized bar codes (not tattooed on their foreheads, but rather printed on their papers), I think this can be used quite well to facilitate quick grading of quizzes with real-time feedback and histograms, class participation credit, and other creative classroom data organizing solutions. This could be made especially effective with the mobility provided by your tablet and wireless.

Anyway, all the best with your pending projects.

Re:Sounds like a good starting point.

[RealityMogul]

He could save his time and the students by prepping his examples, or whatever else he'd write on the board, before school. Then just pull up a saved slide so he doesn't have to spend all that time rewriting it for each class period. Consistent fonts would also mean better readability by the students. Color coding or other text attributes could also contribute to that. Animations would be cool, and maybe explain things better, but I don't think he'd be getting that far into it.

Re:powerpoint

[Technician]

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.

I have no idea how to apply this but...

[localman]

I have learned more math and physics as a result of self-guided programming than I ever did in school. I remember a few years ago I was working on a simple vector graphics system for a video game I was making, and I finally understood the point of converting between cartesian and polar coordinates. Then I added physics to the program and picked up ideas like velocity along the angle of impact vs. the tangent. Recently I was working on a program to find color differences, and had to scale certain 0-1 values into a curve by using various exponents.

These are all simple things that I should have picked up in school. Things which I'm sure were explained but without any practical (or even impractical) application. So I only had the vaguest recollection that they were even possible. But the moment I encountered a programming problem that I wanted to solve, yet required this kind of knowledge, I vacuumed it up.

That may not be what you mean by "using technology" in the classroom, but it's what came to mind for me.

Cheers.

Some, probably

[Selanit]

Obviously, adding technology to a classroom is not inherently beneficial. The mere presence of a bunch of transistors in the room will not improve the students' comprehension. But it's also a bit premature to dismiss it completely. Socrates strongly disliked the whole "marks on papyrus scrolls" technology which was cutting edge in his day -- which is why he never wrote anything down himself. We depend on his student Plato for our knowledge of Socrates' ideas. You and I, right now, are as close to the beginning of digital technology as Socrates was to the beginning of books.[1]

Education takes place inside the student's skull. It's a process of acquiring new concepts, trying to understand them, and then use them. Usually education involves failing to grasp the concept a few times, and then "getting it." The job of the teacher is to introduce the concepts, and to create an environment where the student can try them out, get it wrong, and then get it right. Digital tech can probably help with both steps (introducing concepts, and creating the learning environment). So far a lot of the ways we've tried it have not worked very well -- PowerPoint is an excellent case in point. So PowerPoint isn't useful. Fine. That doesn't mean nothing will ever be useful. Let's try a whole bunch of approaches, scrap the ones that don't work well, and then try even more approaches.

[1] The Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures had been using written communication for a good long while before it reached the Greeks, of course; but Socrates was close to the beginning of books within his own culture.

teach WHY people should study Algebra

[Simonetta]

Hello,
    You have the misfortune of being a high school teacher. You are probably very limited in what you can actually teach because the course work must be all rigidly defined, especially now in the era on 'No Child Left Behind' and the federally enforced overemphasis on testing.

    You have the additional misfortune of being a teacher of a subject that all students must master to get their HS diploma but less than 1% will ever use in their future lives. I work on the margin of the tech industry and I've used high school algebra only once in thirty years. Had to sit through hundreds of hours of classes in it and hundreds of hours of homework which for me was like carving concrete with a teaspoon.

    For algebra (assuming for the sake of argument that it is worth learning), the best tool would be any program that allows the students to move the terms around the equation by clicking, highlighting, and dragging. Then the software should let them know if the resulting equation is equal to the original one. And if not, why not. Also, software that puts simple values into the x and y variables and quickly lets them know whether the equation balances or not. Plus an animated tutor program that shows the steps for solving complex equations. A program with hundreds of solved examples, not just two or three solved examples.

    For calculus, I recommend bringing a dog, a thermometer, and a gun to class. Shoot the dog and put the thermometer into it. Take readings over the next few hours to show how the heat loss of a recent corpse follows a specific natural log curve and how forensic pathologists use these formulas to determine time of death.

    For logarhythms, measure the distances between the frets of an electric guitar to show how each distance is 2 raised to the 1/12 power from the previous fret and how this formula makes possible tuned scales.

    If any of these things work, then consider getting a television show to teach math through iPod instead of in a public school.

risks and benefits

[e**(i pi)-1]

> Would you please share how you have seen technology effectively used for Math and Physics.

I'm both enthusiastic as well as sceptical (and wrote and talked about it [PDF] [harvard.edu]). Here are some major points for me:

• Using technology is like telling jokes. Some people can deliver, other better do not.
• Teaching is complex. Not everybody can handle the additional challenge of technology additionally to the organisatorial and pedagogical parameters. Most of us have experienced bad use of technology. I certainly have produced disasters myself.
• It is often not the technology which produces the failures but the lack of a backup plan. Technology often fails. The advantage of the "good ol blackboard" is that it always works. Even white-boards fail when markers are dry.
• Overuse of technology is like dishing up the same meals again and again. The benefits of technology can wear off, if the novelty is gone.
• I use the rule of thumb: technology can improve a lecture by 20 percent, but adds the risk to losing 80 percent. This risk makes the use of technology exciting and worthwile.

Applets...

[itsdapead]

The http://www.fi.uu.nl/wisweb/en/ [slashdot.org]">Freudenthal institute have a large collection of java applets for secondary/high school education. There's lots of others out there too.

Spreadsheets also have enormous potential for teaching algebra concepts - particularly for getting over the idea of variables and functional relationships (after solving pages of simple "if x + 5 = 7 what is x?" equations, kids often get hung up on the notion that "x" is always a specific number...) Set up simple formulae in a spreadsheet, hide the formulae and have the kids reverse-engineer the formula... [1] Although a web browser might let you download a few :-)

Some Thoughts, and Some Software

[Dr. Faustroll]

Congratulations: you've got some of the potentially most interesting classes to use technology in - but that potential will be wasted if you just use the tablet and projector to show Powerpoint slides.

When you're designing your class, think: what can the tablet do that would be useful that could not have been done without it. Powerpoint fails this test miserably - an overhead projector would do just as well.

Here are some possible uses that do pass the test:

• Use symbolic math software to help students visualize the math, and to explore interesting problems that cannot be handled without it. Mathematica [wolfram.com] is everybody's pet favorite, of course - but I would argue that it's grotesquely overpowered and complex for most of what you'll need. Instead, take a look at something like Ron Avitzur's Graphing Calculator [pacifict.com] - the name doesn't do justice to what is a particularly elegant little program.
• For Physics, use the tablet to analyze physical data. One of the best uses here is to film objects in motion, then transfer the video to the tablet (or get a cheap webcam and record directly on the tablet), and analyze the results frame-by-frame - your students will come out with a much better understanding of motion. A free package for video analysis is Physmo [sourceforge.net].
• For more sophisticated experiments, check out what the folks at PASCO [pasco.com] have to offer - their sensors are reasonably inexpensive.
• If you do a Google search, you'll find a wealth of Java applets that simulate concepts in Physics - when contextualized by discussion, physical experiments, and "what if" explorations, these can be tremendously useful. Without this framework, though, they are no better than the film loops of old.

One last suggestion: don't hog the tablet - let your students use it too. You can set up a problem, and invite students to come up and work through it individually or in groups, showing their thought process to the rest of the class. The students will learn much more, and everybody - including you - will have a lot more fun.

Good luck!

The best Tech application I have seen...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you asked for it, The best application I have seen in a class was in college. The teacher had a remote system (and the students the remotes) that would register responses from the students, a b c d ect.. So what the teach did was give a brief overview of what we should have read, then he had several Quiz questions at the end of the lecture (usually like 15 mins of lecturing). We would answer the questions with the clickers, at no dock to our grade, and then the software would be able to display a graph of the input. The result was that when we came across something we where unfamiliar with as a class, the teacher could easily see it in the quizes, stop, and go over what is confusing to us. That way even if we just thought we understood what he was talking about the quiz would make sure we really did.

As a result Lectures where highly adaptive to the class being taught, and resulted in a great experience over all.

Re:Ways to use the technology

[Arethan]

In terms of equations you are not supposed to remember it (mostly). You are supposed to understand it.

Tell that to my high school trigonometry teacher. (Those were the days...) He expected everyone to remember every trig equation like they came up with it themselves. (And I mean ALL of them, not just the simple stuff.)

So when I found out that he was allowing students to use graphing calculators on the final exam since, "they won't help you anyways", I spent the last week of class time slowly entering all of the functions into my TI-85 so I could refer to them later. Turns out what I did was "damn smart (tm)", because he used every single last one of them on the exam multiple times.

That was the last time I used most of those equations. I still use a few here and there, but never frequently enough to really remember anything past the basic use cases of sin/cos and what their output looks like. In the end I feel that I have accomplished the requirements of high school level trig, as I understand how and why trig works, but asking people to remember those equations is unrealistic and it made the class artificially difficult.

Blackboards Have a Purpose

[tajmahall]

As some see it, the main reason blackboards are used in math/physics is to get the teacher to slow the hell down. The only outcome of technology is teachers who fly through equations too fast for students to copy them.

A set of tools for quantum mechanics

[zolltron]

The Physics Education Group at Kansas State University has made a set of tools [ksu.edu] for teaching quantum mechanics. Some of them involve computer simulation of wave packets, etc. This helps for visualizing the (rather complex) ideas behind quantum mechanics. I interacted with these tools while taking an undergraduate physics course (intended for non-majors). They really worked well.