Phun really is fun!

I must say, I was very intrigued by the programs that we were working with this week. In my chosen field of math, I have always been interested in physics and chemistry. So when I got the chance to work with programs that incorporated those two sciences, I was very excited. I believe that just playing around with Phun was fun enough for me. I really like it's understanding of how objects block water flow and without them, water flows. Also I was glad to see the programs understanding of weight and fixed objects- IE. to make axles. Molecular Workbench seemed fun- but I would like to know what else you do, other than the pre-created self assembly.

Thinking back to the schooling that I've gone through, I could see Phun being used in younger grades to show the idea of physics in a creative, entertaining way. Over the weekend, I told my Mom, a third grade teacher, about this program. I believe that students, even as young as her students, would be able to visually see the physics happening without all of the mess of actually completeing the task in real life. I think that as long as the teacher has a strong grasp of the program, students would be able to greatly benefit when studying the concepts of physics. When students get into higher grades, IE middle school, the students would benefit in their application of physics by utilizing this program.

And as far as Molecular Workbench- I see that being used in conjunction with a new concept of Chemistry in high school. I think that Molecular Workbench could be used for a pre-assessment as to the knowledge and understanding that a student or group of students might have towards the idea of positive and negative charges, molecules, and/or temperature reactivity. I think that the ability to read the direction and then work on the problem at hand is good to keep student's interest. I also think that the ability to easily take screen shots and to write comments/ observations is an excellent way for teachers to be able to assess the student's understanding during or after the exercise.

I feel that if I enjoyed using the programs that I will be interested and excited enough to continue how to learn the program and therefore I could show this, especially Phun, to other teachers in order to have them utlilze the program when working with the Physics concepts that so many Science teachers encounter.

Sketch-Up/ POV-Ray Applications

Using Sketch-Up, I had fun completing a visual of the wants in my new kitchen that I'm planning to redo in the summertime. The two walls that were completed in the sketch are the walls that I want to do redo completely. The cabinets are not drawn to the scale that I am intending to use, but I have already planned to change my drawing in order to accomodate for all four walls of the kitchen and the exact dimensions. Any suggestions of materials- feel free to comment :)

As far as POV-RAY goes, I drug my feet with this program. I found it very difficult to work with and I was not interested to continue working with it. I felt as though the program could be SOooo much more beneficial if I could click and drag an image to the placement that I wanted- And watched how the numbers would change instead of just clicking and guessing as to where the image should go based on the camera angles and placement in the first place. Here's part of my living room:

However, after choosing a more simplistic set of shapes, I was able to accomplish my goal in creating something realistic. Using the geometric shapes that I understood their relation in space, I was able to more freely create these shapes in the POV-Ray program.

Below, is the POV-RAY source code for the series of shapes that I used to create the living room space. The tutorials were definitely a help when it came to making this work successfully.

#include "colors.inc"

global_settings { assumed_gamma 1.0 }

background { color rgb <0.25,> }

camera { location <3.0,> up <0,1.2,0> }

light_source {<5,5,5> color White }

light_source {<-5,5,-5> color White}

light_source {<0,0,0> color White}

plane { <0,-1,0> 1 texture { pigment { color rgb <0.3,0.9,0.5>} normal {facets coords 1.0} }}

plane { <0,0,14> 8 texture {pigment { color rgb <0.7,0.4,0.1>} normal { wood 0.2 turbulence 0.7 }}}

box { <-1.0,-1.0,-1.0>, <1.0,1.0,1.0> texture { pigment { color rgb <.4, .4, .2>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,15>} }
box { <-1.0,-1.0, 1.0>, <2.0,2.0,4.0> texture { pigment { color rgb <.45, .44, .22>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,25>} }
box { <-0.85,2.0,1.1>, <1.85,2.3,3.9> texture { pigment { color rgb <0.46,0.43,0.21>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,15>} }

box { <-0.8,2.3,1.2>, <1.8,> texture { pigment { color rgb <0,>} finish {ambient 0.9} normal {wrinkles 0.5} rotate <15,45,15>} }

sphere { <0.5,2.3,2.5> .5 texture { pigment {color rgb <1,1,1>} normal {ripples 0.5}}}

cone { <0.5,>, 0.0, <.5, 6.2, 2.5>, .6 texture {pigment {color rgb <1,1,1>} normal {ripples 0.5} rotate <0,45,0>}}

cone { <0.5,6.1,2.5>, 1.4, <0.5,10.1,2.5>, 1.0 texture {pigment {color rgb <1,0.91,0.3>}}}

TQ #7: Gapminder

I must admit, when I first took a look at this website- I was sooo excited about it. At the current point in my curriculum at school, we were working on interpretting graphs. It was my plan that this website would be awesome in order to show students the real-life examples that they so often ask for. I was so excited to show my students how graphs can be such wonderful tools to organize and display data. I was also so excited to have them all working on a topic that interested them while on the same website; asking similar but different questions.-talk about differentiation. The possibilities were endless and my excitement was overwhelming. I was so interested to show this to one of my boss's but boy, am I glad, that I did not invite them in...

The night before the lesson where I was going to have the students work on interrpreting the graphs from gapminder.org/world, I explored the website and pulled out the variables that 7th grade students might find interest in exploring. Here's the list that I posted on the board for the students to choose two variables to compare:
Income per person
Infant mortality rate
Children per woman
Life expectany at birth
CO2 emissions
Sugar consumption per person
Female labour force
Military expenditure
Total income
Primary school completion (girls/ boys)
Ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary ed
Literacy rate (adults and children)(girls/boys/ total)
Population
Children and elderly (per adults)
Surface area
Paved roads
Urban population
Mortality rate
Health issues (etc)
Electricity/ Oil consumption
Cell phone use
Internet users
Poverty
Export/Import of goods and services

Each student choose two variables, I set them off to start up the computers and head to the website with some time to explore on their own. The students choose wonderful comparisons and I was really interested to see the connections they could make. UN-fortunately, my excitement fell short when all we could view was a grey screen. Usually most websites are very compatible with Mac computers and I thought this one would be the same- I checked it briefly in the morning to make sure that it wasn't blocked and thought that things would be a go. Unfortunately I have still not been able to complete this lesson plan with the students and as much as I don't like assigning homework that can't be done at school- I did, just so that I could share the excitement of this powerful tool with some of my students.

All in all, I think this tool, when working properly, has loads of organized information that is able to be understood by many, many children. By having the ability to choose variables that interest/ that student can relate to really gives a powerful edge to this program. By being able to view the 'continent areas' (used loosely as they were generally continents but not always) in different colors, your statements can be very general in that you see the majority trends of that area. But then, you are able to be very specific/ selective in order to view just one country and watch/track it's trends. The connections that students could make to graphs are endless and the connections that they can make the real world could potentially be a very persuasive tool to show the change that may need to be made. I've put in a work-order in order to hopefully provide the students their chance to really engage in a discussion based on this website.

As far as limitations, I would be concerned about all of the different variables that students can choose. Some are very appropriate for all ages but there are a view that could be viewed as providing too much information for some young minds. There are some graphs that have limited data but I think that proves an interesting tool in order to promote reasonable estimations based on the trends that we are able to uncover. Overall, I am definitely looking forward to the time when I can share this tool with my students during our graphing unit.

TQ #6: Elluminate revisited

I must say, I need to retrack any former statements that I said about Elluminate. I was very surprised about the abilities that I didn't realize that there were on Elluminate. From the ability for more than one person to communicate to the ability to have students work ahead on their work if interested but then also forced at points to all be at the same page. I was also very impressed that I recieved an email from Elluminate, asking me if I wanted to view a live demo of the Elluminate in order to be a better "leader". I have to say that after that Thursday night class, my opinions have definitely changed and I am considering using this tool in order to provide a different form of help for my students. Time... And learning on my part... will tell.

TQ #6: Web conferencing and ELearning

When I first heard about E-learning about four years ago, I was alittle bit nervous about the future of education. At the time, I thought there was a possibility that my job might be in jeopardy in years to come. However, after now having the opportunity to research, expose myself to the technology, and explore what's out there, I know that my job will be around for years to come. Whereas there are some benefits that can promote E-learning, the negatives far outweigh that positives at this time. For this last encounter with collaborative services, my group members and I explore Elluminate. We chose Elluminate because it was the product that class was going to be run on and we were not familiar with this product.
As of right now, I believe my group members would agree with me when I say this, but we are not big fans of the program. After exploring with my team, we became frustrated and annoyed with the program that we believed was going to be better than what we had worked with before. As Kevin and I were talking, one would talk, then click the button/keys, then the other could talk and click the button, then the original (I say it in this way because we were frustrated with the fact that we could not talk at the same time, that we constantly had to wait until the other person was finished with their thought, only to forget the original thought or there was a need for one person to talk and the other to type to keep a true conversation going). This became annoying in that one person was the "leader" and the other the "follower". This also became apparent when we were working with different applications. It was as seamless as we would have thought. Another thing that I became frustrated with is that I could not see the person I was talking to. All in all, after our experience, I have a feeling that Kevin is going to tell his co-workers about this wonderful program that takes the place of their two programs they use to collaboratively conference call. And I am not going to my students to set up collaborative programs as homework. Whereas the program was nice to explore, I can't believe that this is one of the better programs out there right now for conference calling/ E-learning.
When thinking about how this program could help my classroom, I feel that there are too many glitches to make it worthwhile. For one, it's based on the Internet and that is never a reliable source. Two, if I were to give a presentation to a group of students through Elluminate, I would never know if I lost a student to a computer game, the bathroom, or another room to watch TV. I felt as like it would seem as though they were with me throughout the presentation/ conference because answers could be typed sporadically and if I asked a question, they could run over to the computer and answer but were they really paying attention. Third, I didn't see the collaboration element if students could not talk at the same time nor view a screen that was being changed as a real-time speed compared the delay responses that we experienced. All in all, I can see how I would like the program to be modified in order to make it useful to me and so far I haven't found that modified program. So for the purposes of my needs, I feel that I will continue to be quite needed in the classroom and not in front of some computer, teaching the students in that way.

TQ 5: The benefits of concept mapping

When teaching, I feel it is important to try new things, to make changes to the curriculum, and to see what works. With concept mapping, I would definitely give collaborative concept mapping a try to see how it works. However I am sceptical that it would take a lot of work to help students to understand the benefits of the tools and I don't see myself applying this new tool too soon. The reasons I would give it a try are that it helps to fill the state standards and it promotes constructivism. However, I think the time that it would take the students, who have trouble organizing what's laid out for them, to learn this new idea would outweigh the benefit it would make unless it was used from year to year. All in all, I think schools could benefit from this idea if all grades would support using the same/ similar resources so that the students get used the similar process.

As mentioned before, I don't know if this idea of a collaborative concept map would be too practical for the setting that I am working with. The students who are going to pick up quick to an idea like this are those who can organize their thoughts and pull out key words. I have learned, through the years, how to keep myself organized- I feel that making a concept map was easy. However, I fear that the students who have trouble organizing their notebook in a class who teaches you how to organize your notebooks, will also have trouble organizing the concept map. I'm not sure if they would be able to make the connections to make the map fit. (On the other hand, this could be the missing link- and therefore, proving me wrong but showing that the tool is useful to someone new- which is my goal in teaching.) With all of that being said, I would definitely try this tool in my class and I really like the idea of collaborating to learn "working together" skills. My only hope that this tool would not become a unit itself- learning how to use the tool that after some explanations the students would be able to work with it on their own.

As far as teacher skill goes, as with any technology, I believe that a teacher needs to know and understand how the program/ tool/ skill works before they are truly able to teach another person about it. Here with this tool, teachers need to both understand concept maps and how they function along with how to work with the program that runs the mapping process. Simplicity would be key here as the simpler the teachers keeps the project the more they are able to help out and the more that the students can be differentiated. As stated before, all teachers should be exposed to tools like this because then the tools can be used cross- grade levels and therefore their knowledge can continue to grow throughout the years.

According to the standards, there are three separate PA state standards that fulfill the idea of learning how to organize one's own thoughts for writing, for discussions, and for research. I feel that concept maps can easily be used to support the organization for discussions that are held as to a single topic, along with finding ease in creating a map to support research that has been found. When students are able to take the appropriate amount of time to have their understand build, they will be able to easily utilize tools like concept mapping to organize their thoughts.

All in all, I believe that this tool can be helpful in schools, if the schools are able to encourage different grade levels to be on board with similar concept mapping tools. In this way, the student's learning can continue to grow in understanding throughout the years. I believe that this tool supports the constructivist model of learning in that it puts the knowledge that the student is gaining through their discoveries in a way that they can organize their findings to then make more connections. Therefore, it keeps their understanding in a state of "constant development"(North Central Regional Educational Laboratory). Once again, I am interested to have students, who have learned, or have knowledge of, a new topic organize their learning to help them make connections through using a concept mapping tool like Cmap.

North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/content/cntareas/science/sc5model.htm

TQ #4: Wenglinksy's views

There's a common statement going around in the education world: "Students work needs to be individualized and assignments must meet the needs of the learner." Whereas most educators would agree with this statement, we all know that it doesn't always happen. The same thing goes with using computers as a method of improving anything. The assignment needs to cater more towards the students learning styles than one assignment for the whole class. Some students will prosper based on one type of computer use and another will benefit from a completely different use. On the conceptual basis, I do agree with Wenglinksy when he says, "computer use is positively associated with student performance when computer are used in a constructivist manner." A majority of the students will preform better when working in a group on a topic that interests them while continuing to collaborate about the given topic. Unfortunately, in my experience, individual performance is hard to assess in a group setting so how do you determine how a child has benefited from one type of learning or another unless some type of individual assessment is given?
While reading through Wenglinsky's section on Mathematics, I was thinking that all of what he was saying from the tests made sense. From 1996 to 2000, it was stated that computers became more available in class but that frequency of computer use in school went down. It makes sense because although the radio of computes to students went up in a school, computers that the whole class could work on were in a lab providing for a whole school. Therefore meaning that more computers were available for the school's use but maybe not readily available for a single class to use. The piece about home use makes sense because more teachers, at least in a rural setting, are able to give out work to be done on the computers at home because they are available there. As far as the type of use based on student performance also makes sense that eighth graders would benefit more from simulations and demonstration whereas fourth graders would be benefitting from drill and practice on the computers because of the curriculum and maturity differences. All in all, the statements from the tests seemed to support any of the thoughts that I've had about computer use in the schools.
Knowing that students, in a seventh grade setting, benefit from technology which demonstrates simulations and modeling, I look for methods of incorporating technology in my curriculum in ways that will support this thinking. I know that if I have students complete a worksheet, even the most elaborate kind with special fonts and pictures, on the computer that no more learning will occur than if I gave it to them on a copied sheet of paper or on an overhead. Whereas if I make the outcome be some type of project, where research is needed to be done through the computer or applications, students are learning much more than any amount of words of text alone. Collaboration is key and inquiry is the basis that drives this type of learning to benefit the student more than drill and practice.
The one thing that bugs me about all of the "research" that is, should, or being done is that you can never seem to find substantial evidence supporting or oppose computers. Supports can find plenty of research to support computer use. And opposers of computers can find plenty of reasons to share why computers provide no benefit. Could it possibly be because computers are such a mindless piece of scrap parts that the only real method of using the parts is to really understand how they all work? Should we maybe focus more on making sure that all teachers know how to use the materials that are available, and that all of the pieces work as planned, before getting more materials to "show" that technology is in a school?