ETEC 533 E-folio

Unpacking Assumptions: What is good use of educational technology? – Jan 8, 2013

We need to be careful that we don’t just use technology because we can, and not get caught up in the wow factor. Also to be careful that just because we are teaching math, science or a technology that everything does not need to be taught with technology. There are plenty of ways to teach concepts and many of the old ways still work; always mix it up.

I am writing from a post-secondary perspective; thus here are some aspects that we consider before using technology. Use it if it is appropriate for the situation to help get an idea or concept across or to help students challenge their conceptions, which as we have seen maybe misconceptions. If a teacher struggles with trying to get a concept across time and time again then maybe this is an opportunity to use some aspect of technology to help in the delivery. I remember in a remote sensing class as a student trying to understand the concept of how satellites move or don’t move with respect to the earth. Some are geostationary over the same place like weather satellites and some orbit around the earth as it rotates below. I read it over and over again in the textbook and listened carefully to the Prof, but it made little sense. Eventually I spent some time thinking about it and modelling it with round objects and eventually figured it out. Many years later I found myself coordinating the development of curriculum for a program that included a remote sensing course. In a discussion with the Instructor who was rebuilding the course, we came to the same conclusion that this satellite orbit concept puzzled him as well as a student. So part of his curriculum development involved working with a multimedia expert to develop a simulation of satellite orbits that the students could work through on their own. This saved much time and frustration on the part of the instructor trying to explain it in class and it became a real benefit for the students as they no longer had to watch the instructor try to explain something that was difficult to get across.

Working for a Polytechnic, we need programs that are a fine balance of training and education. The employers love our graduates as they are more “job ready” than university graduates. Thus the technologies that we use are applicable and relevant to the jobs the graduates will be moving into.

Comments from my classmates and instructor on this post?

“I agree with you, Douglas.  Using technology is great, but it has to be balanced with methods that aren’t technology dependent. I find that I often don’t have access to the technology all the time anyway at my elementary school, as all teachers are scheduled for certain times to use the SMARTBoards, laptops, and iPads.  Limited resources means that we have to be creative with the technology, but also when we’re without it!” – Stacey Bernier

“I remember our good “Wow” factor discussion last semester in 522.  While the “Wow” can initially capture student attention, it often lacks the ability to really engage the student, and it’s that engagement that really keeps them coming back, dig deeper, and allows them to experience meaningful knowledge building.  Not to mention the great expense trying to furnish classrooms with Wow technology.  SMARTBoards are such a good example. They really can be very useful technological tools for the classroom when effectively used, but I suspect that in many classrooms they are just Wow, and not much more. A convient tool for the teacher, but too often not much more than an expensive projector screen.” – Peggy Lawson

” “…the old ways still work”. Interesting point. Sometime we do reinvent the wheel just to add in the wow factor of technology. I always want to pick the right tool for the job instead of just picking a tool that is new and flashy. I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t like using technology for technology’s sake. If technology is the best way to get a concept across to students, that is great! But if there is another avenue that works better, then I don’t want to try to implement technology where it’s not needed.” – Jamie Peters

“A few years ago when I was at your campus with some of my students (Explore-IT confererence), I experienced some fabulous technology enriched STEM activities. Of these activities, the girls came back most excited about the sessions that involved project building/creation. I know that my district and your school have worked and continue to work in creating opportunities to partner up.” – Jerry Mah

“I couldn’t agree more with your post. Technology is just one tool that we need to keep in our toolbox and use only in appropriate circumstances. We wouldn’t use a hammer to paint a wall and as such we should select the right tool for the right job.” – Manpreet Loyla

“I liked hearing how modelling helped you to eventually figure out a conceptually challenging problem. This is an important insight for teaching within STEM education-and prompts us to ask how can modeling be integrated with digital technologies to achieve outcomes in learning and job readiness?” – Samia Khan – Instructor

Originally posted on the UBC 2012W2 course-ETEC533-65A-Technology in the Mathematics and Science Classroom, MA-L2: Unpacking Assumptions – January 8, 2013

Conceptional Challenges: Is Greenland larger than South America – Jan 8, 2013

I found it interesting watching the video “A Private Universe” where they talked about inadvertent distortions or exaggerations of the earth’s orbit around the sun in diagrams in books and how children through to adults grasp this concept and can’t let it go. This resonated with me so I went on a quest to search for a resource that I could find to explore this idea. In the end it led me to maps as they are a flat diagram of our round earth and do have some significant distortions and exaggerations that we accept.

The number one assumption about maps is they all lie; however we quite often forget this assumption from childhood to adulthood. We create flat maps to represent the round earth because it is more convenient than carrying around a globe.

Have you ever tried to peel an orange and then flatten the peel out on a table; it buckles warps and splits. When a map is made, this happens but the buckles, warps and splits are hidden by the projection. One of the more popular projections is the Mercator which creates a nice grid of right angled longitude and latitude lines. However on the earth, all points of longitude (north/south) lines meet at single points at the north and south poles. To keep these nice right angled intersections in a Mercator projection, the points of the north and south poles are stretched out into long lines the same length as the equator. Thus the distortions in the polar areas are enormous and the features on the map such as Greenland appear to be much larger than they are. Thus Greenland appears to be larger than South America and Russia appears to be larger than Africa. In reality South America is eight times larger than Greenland and Africa is nearly double the size of Russia. (Toney, 2007).

There is a movement to actually ban the Mercator projection because of the misconceptions of the size of countries, continents and oceans created by this projection. There is no “right” map projection to use as they all have some distortions. Geographers generally agree that the Robinson projection is best but it is not perfect. So it is no wonder that we problems with our concepts about of the sizes of countries.

Technology does give us a definite advantage to solve this problem as it allows us to get away from the flat distorted paper map. Programs like Google Earth give us an accurate representation of the earth. Hopefully more and more people are using Google Earth rather than bringing up an old Mercator map on the internet such as Google Maps. And of course there is always the low tech but accurate standard that should be in every classroom; the globe which I am starring at as I write this posting.

References:

Confrey, J. (1990). A review of the research on student conceptions in mathematics, science, and programming. Review of Research in Education, 16, 3-56. Retrieved online January 5, 2013 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1167350

Driver, R., Guesne, E., & Tiberghien, A. (1985). Children’s ideas an the learning or science. Children’s Ideas in Science, 1-9. Retrieved online January 5, 2013 from http://staff.science.uva.nl/~joling/vakdidactiek/documenten/driver.pdf

Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science Education, 66(2), 211-227. Retrieved online January 5, 2013 from http://siba.unipv.it/fisica/articoli/S/ScienceEducation1982_66_211.pdf

Toney, A. (2007). Geography Misconceptions. Accessed online January 8, 2013 at http://tech42.net/science55/geography1.html

Comments from my instructor on this post:

“An intriguing question and visualization of the problem. The challenge to achieve perspective in geography and astronomy is noteworthy among children. Driver and Posner suggest the conditions to help address such conceptual challenges.” – Samia Khan, Instructor

Originally posted on the UBC 2012W2 course-ETEC533-65A-Technology in the Mathematics and Science Classroom, MA-L2: Conceptual Challanges – January 8, 2013

Auto e-ography: My trials with digital Technology over the years – Jan 3, 2013

This posting is much longer than called for, but it was a fascinating journey for me back through time, framed around my educational and career experiences. To set the stage, I am of a certain vintage that I am a digital immigrant; thus I do have an occasional accent when I speak digital. For example, I sometimes refer to the “return” key instead of the “enter” key; read on and you will see why.

Over the last 24 hours, I thought of several first digital experiences over my life that I will briefly describe, and then tie it all together in a pattern that I now can see. In junior high school around 1970, I was one of the first kids to get a calculator. I begged my parents to buy me one; they finally gave in despite my older brother who was successfully finishing high school using a slide rule. When I started working in industry in the late 1970’s changes were starting to happen, digital technology started to creep in. The engineers were using the “mainframe computer” to do air shed modelling around sour gas facilities; this fascinated me, but it was only for engineers, not for technologists like me. In reality they were programming the computer using punch cards, not using a keyboard, monitor or mouse. Around the same time the secretaries on the floor were moving from electric typewriters to enhanced electric typewriters that had could display one line of text before printing, and they could store a whole letter on a magnetic card for later recall. This fascinated me, but it was only for the secretaries. I felt isolated and frustrated, the secretaries and engineers were using digital technologies, but I was not allowed. I did take one of these new typewriters for a test drive one day when our secretary was sick, I was hooked, but I got a real thrashing from the boss when he caught me at Mary’s desk.

In the early 1980’s while working in the Lab, we got some new analytical equipment that came with a PC computer. I immediately enrolled in a programming course so I could figure out how to use it to do some basic data analysis and data formatting. The course used a mainframe (finally I got to use a mainframe!) and it did not use punch cards, instead it used a line printer (sort of like an old teletype, no monitor, all paper based).
I returned to school in the mid 1980’s to do a B. Sc. It was getting costly to keep paying someone to type my papers so I spent a lot of time in the new computer labs figuring out how to work a word processor so I could do it myself (Mary would have been impressed!). I took a course in remote sensing and was fascinated – playing with computers and manipulating digital images from space. As image processing was math intensive, the remote sensing students got priority on the one new 386 computer with the optional math co-processor. To render one 3D image with a digital elevation model took about 15-20 minutes instead of up to an hour with the standard suite of 286 computers that the GIS students used, time to go for a coffee or lunch!

I continued my education and did a Masters degree in remote sensing in the early 1990’s. This is when I bought our first PC based computer: 1990. For my research, we had a digital Landsat image on the system that I could use, but I needed digital elevation data to marry to the image for the analysis. My supervisor ordered some digital elevation data from the province that I could use, this was a new product, and no one in the department had used it before. It arrived months later on six large magnetic tape reels, unfortunately it was at a low baud rate and the University did not have a machine that could read it. He suggested that I contact the local college to see if they could read it and copy it to an Exabyte tape. So I did, and it all fit onto one 8 mm tape cartridge (like a cassette tape on steroids!), that fit in the palm of my hand, amazing. After a bit of negotiating, I talked one of my colleagues into writing a program so I could get it into a format that our software could read. This was all much easier than the grad students one year ahead of me, who spent days and weeks digitizing the contour lines from topographic maps, and then they needed to run interpolation programs to convert it into raster data to get it ready.

One more digital story. After graduating I worked in industry in the mid 1990’s, this time developing applications for airborne imagery. GPS systems were just starting to move from research to be available to the consumer. Our pilot had purchased a rather large and somewhat inaccurate GPS to see if he could use it for navigation purposes. I was fascinated so I started using it to program our flight lines; 30-50 metre accuracy was close enough for our needs. This way I would give the pilot the flight line file the day before the mission. He would upload it to the GPS and after flying to the target area, he would concentrate on flying the flight lines and I could concentrate on collecting the digital imagery. Previously I would need to familiarize him with some landmarks as we approached the target area and then have him fly back and forth in the general area.

Now fast forward to 2013, how does this all fit together and what is the pattern? State of the art digital technology is only state of the art for a short period of time before it becomes assimilated into our everyday electronic tools. The calculator that replaced the slide rule has been integrated into our everyday tools: lap tops, tablets and mobile devices (I still have a couple of calculators kicking around the house). The capabilities of the mainframe computer used for air shed modeling used by the engineers and the early lab computer can be easily handled today with a simple spreadsheet program. Mary’s enhanced electric typewriter is integrated into our everyday digital devices. That 386 computer with a math co-processor can do nothing compared to the capabilities of today’s mobile devices. The whole process of combining digital data sets and rendering images is done instantly with fly-throughs with the click of a button in Google Maps and Google Earth. There is no need to order and store large data sets locally, we now just reach out to the cloud and magically and instantly it is there. And finally, our mobile devices and the new GPS watch that I bought last week blows away the accuracy and capability of the rack mounted GPS technology from the 1990’s.

This does not necessarily raise questions, but provides an insight into how fast we develop digital technologies and how quickly we consume them into our systems and never look back. When we do look back it is almost frightening how fast we are changing and how reliant we are on our technologies.

Comments from my classmates on my Auto e-ography:

“It was interesting to read your story and to connect with all your technology points in history. It’s funny to look at the computing power we had access to back in the days of the 386. What’s more amazing to me is the technology that NASA used to get a man on the moon. One other part of your post really resonated with me. While taking ETEC 510, I became interested in GIS and its application in K-12 education. I think this technology has really become accessible to classrooms through Google and others.” – Jerry Mah

“From the other side of the fence, I was one of the kids who enviously watched another student get a calculator. It was the 70’s and I vividly recall how unfair it seemed that he could get “magic” help with his math. He was always finished his assignments before us. The technology was pretty basic though – heating up the wires to show the answers seems pretty rudimentary now, but at the time – WOW!” – Samuel Nelles

Originally posted on the UBC 2012W2 course-ETEC533-65A-Technology in the Mathematics and Science Classroom, MA-L1: Auto e-ography – January 3, 2013