Saturday, June 30, 2012
Interview with Microsoft's Bill Gates
Interview with Microsoft's Bill Gates: ABCNEWS.COM - Microsoft's founder and chairman talks oil and clean energy on "This Week."
Trends in Distant Learning
1- Your group's VoiceThread presentation embedded,
2- A description of how your group collaborated in the making of your presentation,
We started our collaboration by e-mail. After knowing our team members, Heather recommended using the Wiggio.com as a collaboration tool.
Then Michael started the wiggio-team group through which we divide the work among each other. Later we used the chat room to discuss the process. Once we uploaded a PowerPoint and shared it on VoiceThread each started recording his/her comments.
3- Your experiences using VoiceThread.
Voice thread is easy to navigate, and the only way to learn about this tool is to start a project then learn about how to do things in the process. The help link is very helpful and clear. Through the help I learned how to add and delete slides.
Also, the recording feature was so easy to use.
4- A reflection of how you think VoiceThread could be used in your presentation/professional life.
VoiceThread is a collaboration and presentation tool. Even though it limits “the uploads” to pictures and videos; still it is very helpful. I can use VoiceThread for students to post their projects and presentation. The ability to write on screen, to pause, and to add written and verbal comments are amazing. As for collaboration the 4 of us worked on the same power point. We were able to see each others’ work and share ours.
I can use in the IPC class (Integrated physics and chemistry, for the History of the Atomic Structure. In this group project the students prepare a slide show to introduce to class the components of the Atomic structure and how it evolved over time.
Friday, June 22, 2012
WolframAlpha Tool
1. Name of the Tool
WolframAlpha
2. URL of the Tool
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
3. Please select the one, primary category for this tool:
Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Tool and Presentation Tool
4. Please describe this tool in your own words in about 150-250 words.
Wolfram is a resourceful website for teachers and students.
For teachers, WolframAlpha provides:
a. Interactive visuals in almost every discipline. I used one of these interactive projects (visuals) to create a computer based activity (see attachment below # 10)
b. Interactive visuals, graphs, and other information can be used as links on power points.
c. WolframAlpha provides notes related to the topic you select, in my case I selected acceleration. I can use these notes as a reading selection to my students. Along with the reading selection, I can make my own list of questions and ask the students to answer.
d. Lesson Plans
The neat thing about Wolfram is that you can pick the level of the class. In my situation I selected High School Physics rather than College Physics.
For students, Wolfram provides the following:
a. Resource of information, as dictionary, encyclopedia, and even more a good example will be that for the term wave. When I typed the word wave, in addition to definitions as nouns and verbs I got phrases, other notable uses, movies, internet domains, crossword puzzle clues.
And I got word frequency history, inflected forms and narrower terms.
a. It provides formulas, sample problems, notes and interactive visuals to observe the difference between accelerated motion and constant velocity.
a. Wolfram provides a forum where students can ask questions and have discussions with other students using the forum
5. What do you need to know before using this tool? (What skills do you need to have?)
Basic knowledge of how to use computers and how to search the net
6. What do you need to have before using this tool? (Resources)
The user needs an internet connection and a computer, in order to save your portfolio your need a pro-membership for $4.99/month
7. How do you use this tool? (Write the basic steps using a numbered list)
8. If applicable, please create an example with this tool and either embed it in your blog or submit the URL if the example is located on another website.
9. Include screenshots, audio podcasts, screencasts, or other multimedia elements that help describe the tool and how you used it. (Please indicate what program you used for this task.)
To answer the questions 7 through 9, I prepared a slide show using the “Smilebox” Tool. These slides include screenshots and captions. Below is the link to the SmileBox slide show
10. Please describe a scenario of how you might use this tool in a teaching environment (150-250 words).
A. assignment from the Wolfram lesson plans
http://www.wolframalpha.com/educators/lessonplans/Gravitational_Acceleration.pdf
Helpful information and specific measurements are provided in the diagram below.
1 meter = 3.2808399 feet (3 feet 3⅜ inches)
Basket Ball Court Design (I hour/ in class or computer lab activity)
Application Activity
Pre-requisites: Students should have been introduced to :
1. Gravitational acceleration
2. Air Resistance
3. Net Force
4. Basic Algebra
Materials:
Computer stations or Laptops with internet Connection
Calculators, pencils and activity sheet
Problem:
Pretend to be a resident in a colony on the moon! The residents decided to build a basket ball court, and assigned you to design the court. The design included:
a. The length and width of the court
b. The height of the hoop
Consider in you design the difference in the gravitational acceleration (gravity).
Use the Interactive Demonstration to help you in your design.
Interactive Demonstration link:
11. What are the advantages of using this tool in a teaching environment?
The advantage of this tool is the rich pool of resources that are presented in differentiated methods and levels.
12. What are the disadvantages of using this tool in a teaching environment?
The only disadvantage is that I did not see a link to add students. The students need to buy their own membership which is $2.99/month
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Active learning
1. What study was the inspiration for this study? (Please cite author, title, where it was published, and the URL)
For Active Learning Module, I reviewed a research paper published by Developmental Psychology 1996, Vol. 32, # 1, 102-119
“The Development of Scientific Reasoning in Knowledge- Rich Contexts” by Leona Schauble
Research Review:
The purpose of this research was to find the impact of experimentation on scientific reasoning. The participants included 10 middle school students (5 boys-5 girls) and 10 unrelated adults who had not attended college (9 women- 1man). The researcher monitored development of “Scientific Reasoning” by observing the following signs:
1. The ability to make valid inclusion inferences (causal variables)
2. The ability to make valid exclusion inferences (non-causal variables)
3. Not being able to determine the variable causal role (indeterminacy)
*Validity is based on sufficient quality and quantity of experimental data.
The data was collected during two experiments conducted in six sessions.
The amazing results are clearly displayed in the following graph and tables:
2. Why is the study important?
Nature of Science was 1 of the 5 objectives tested on TAKs (17/55 questions on the TAKs exam). Also, Nature of Science is an essential goal in the EOC Exam. The questions are asked at higher level on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Unfortunately, on the Biology EOC Exam conducted this year only 41% of the students passed the exam in the state of Texas. To avoid legal and liability conflict with parents the test results were curved! See the following snapshot from the tea.gov website (Texas Education Agency) http://www.tea.state.tx.us/staar/rpt/sum/
Based on the above data, science teachers in the state of Texas should include strategies that increase the problem-solving skills in the daily lesson plans. Critical-thinking and problem-solving skills should be utilized daily with every objective in the science content.
3. What is the basic research question?
Teaching the science content in a project oriented units will improve students’ performance on the EOC Exam questions type.
4. Who are the subjects/participants of the proposed study?
High School Physics Class/ students in physics classes standards and honor.
5. Where the study would be conducted?
Public School setting in the state of Texas
6. What is the time frame of the study?
The study will extend over the course time frame (Block-schedule/1semester: regular schedule/1 school year)
7. What type of data would be collected?
8. How the data would be analyzed?
type of data
|
Sample of data
|
How the data would be analyzed?
|
Qualitative
|
Observation/Survey
Students’ motivation, participation, completion and quality of projects
|
Teacher will analyze the data by analyzing a 5 questions survey after each class on a scale from 0 through 5
|
Quantitative
|
Performance on 5 questions assessment
(either released EOC questions or similar questions)
|
Percentage of passing (4 out of 5 questions right)
|
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Module-2 mini-research
1. What study was the inspiration for this study?
Title: The evolution of research on collaborative learning
DILLENBOURG, P., BAKER, M., BLAYE, A. & O'MALLEY, C.(1996) The evolution of research on collaborative In E. Spada & P. Reiman (Eds) Learning in Humans and Machine: Towards an interdisciplinary learning science. (211). Oxford: Elsevier.
P. Dillenbourg (Université de Genève, Switzerland)
M. Baker (CNRS, France)
A. Blaye (Université de Provence à Aix, France)
C. O'Malley (University of Nottingham, UK)
Research Review:
The researchers of the above listed paper expressed that, for decades researches focused on the how “individuals function in a group” and on “several independent variables (size of the group, composition of the group, nature of the task….)” impact on collaborative learning. The researchers found that the independent variables used in the previous studies interacted with one another, and hence it was difficult to deduct clear correlations as of direct cause-effect relationship.
The research main question was:
“Is Collaborative learning more efficient than learning alone”
The researchers were so specific in their study. They distinguished between
1. Learning and problem solving
2. Collaboration and cooperation
Based on this distinction, the researchers developed different techniques to match each one.
The main purpose of the study is to focus on the group (team in the collaborative learning) as a unit of analysis. The individual members (students) are considered as cognitive systems in the unit. To study the unit the researchers had to look it from three approaches:
1- The socio-constructivist approach: inter-actions with others in the team through “conflicts and coordination of points of view” enhances learning. (members of the team have different viewpoints)
2- The socio-cultural approach: This approach relate the social interaction as a cause to individual cognitive change. (members of the team have different levels of skill)
The researchers’ Results:
1- The low achievers progressively become passive when collaborating with high achievers. So, if the team members are at four levels (-1, 0. +1, +2) the +1 was the only one observed to have significant improvement.
2- Pairs are more effective than larger groups.
3- Students should have a certain cognitive level to benefit from collaboration. (the ability to translate conflict -interaction into cognitive restructuring)
Finally, the researchers recommended that: “we should stop using the word ‘collaboration’ in general and start referring only to precise categories of interaction.”
2. Why is the study important?
As a science high school teacher I tried many teaching methods to help enhance learning in my classroom. During 1998, I started teaching an Inquiry based curriculum published by Its-About-Time “Active Physics” and “EarthComm”. This inquiry based curriculum is based on the 5e’s learning cycle, among which is explore. Explore is the collaborative learning part of the learning cycle. I cannot express enough how challenging it is. Some students used to beg to work by themselves because others will just copy from them. I tried many strategies over the years such as:
1- Assigning roles for the team members, by mentoring them how the roles work as writer, material manager, and so on.
2- As a part of their lab writing was to evaluate the team members’ performance and effort during the lab.
3- Sorting Cards to group students, these colored cards had an image, a letter, a number after handing out the cards as the students come in the class I group them either by color or number or the image. Kids are kids they tried to exchange the cards to get with the smart ones, or the trouble makers tried to stay together.
If I want to list all the strategies I used, it will take pages to cover all of them. I am not saying that this problem is in all classes, because it varied from standard classes to honors and AP classes.
For this reason, I selected my mini-research to be about:
3. What is the basic research question?
Students conducting a wave gizmo over the computer will perform better on the post assessment than students working in pairs in a traditional lab setting.
4. Who are the subjects/participants of the proposed study?
High school Integrated Physics and Chemistry Class (mostly 9-10 graders)
I will collect from 12 students:
a. 4 high performing students (2 boys and two girls, level of performance will be based on class grades, TAKS performance 8th grade)
b. 4 standard students (2 boys and two girls, level of performance will be based on class grades, TAKS performance 8th grade)
c. 4 low performing students (2 boys and two girls, level of performance will be based on class grades, TAKS performance 8th grade including science and math grades)
From each group of 4 students, I will have 1female and 1 male student conduct the Gizmo, and 1female and 1 male student conduct the traditional lab
5. What is the time frame of the study?
I will collect data during the spring semester. During the fall semester, I will be observing the students to make sure that my subjects in each group are very close in performance level.
6. Where would the study be conducted?
In a public high school standard level class
7. What type of data would be collected?
I will collect both
a. Quantitative data- TAK’s , class performance daily and assessment
b. Qualitative data- observation (motivation, participation in classroom discussion)
c. I will make sure that the traditional lab handout match all the material covered by the gizmo.
8. How the data would be analyzed?
The pre-data: I will look for similarities
Post-data: I will compare the data, if the students who participated in the gizmo performed better; then, my hypothesis will be true and vise versa.
then click on browse Gizmos, I typed waves
then pick the 1st activity
Also, you can launch the Gizmo for a 5-minutes or 30-days free trial.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)