Self Reflection #4

In this new age of being environmentally safe, in which we are taught to constantly recycle, to turn of electricity when leaving the room and they are developing new hybrid cars to help pollution. Why not become more paperless? I believe one of the biggest advancements in education and communication between students and teachers is the use of the Dropbox. For those who don’t know, a dropbox is a program that I discovered in college. My professor had the whole class download this dropbox program, then to demonstrate the ability of it he took an article he wanted all of us to read placed it into the dropbox and suddenly it appeared on our computer. According to the Powerful Learning Practice website the Dropbox program is a multifaceted tool used to connect a group of people, it is used to sync and share documents and data between computers, tablets and other personal computing device. I believe that the creation of the dropbox, is a very convenient way for a teacher or professor to share documents with their students, whether its homework or even used to help with homework. The best advantage is also that students can also drop things in the dropbox to share this way sharing ideas are much easier and simpler, this way the day of class moves a lot faster and smoother.

 

http://plpnetwork.com/2012/08/10/dropbox-a-superb-classroom-tool/

Self Reflection #3

Growing up, science was never a strong subject for me because I was always asked to visualize and look further into experiments and other ideas that I could never actually figure out. I feel like too much of science is left up to the imaginative mind of the student and it could lead to a miss interpretation of information. While researching new technology for teaching I came across the idea of probeware. Based on the http://www.wisegeek.com website probeware is a computer program that is now being used very often in many science class rooms, to collect, organize and analyze data. I thought to myself, this would have made classes like chemistry and biology much more easy. To have a dependent program or software to not only correctly collect data but to help me analyze and find certain relationships and behavioral patterns. I feel like the use of probeware eliminates the imaginative aspect of science classes. Certain experiments that can’t be done or finished because of the time constraints of the class session would be helped with the use of probes. According to http://www.guide2digitallearning.com, the website took a survey to determined how students who worked with probeware computer programs did on test compared to those who didn’t and the results showed that those with probeware scored much higher. The website http://www.wisegeek.com stated and example of the effectiveness of probeware, they described an experiment in which a probe would be attached to a cylinder filled with a liquid and the probe would catalog the temperature changes through each experiment. In the end i believe that the use of probeware should be furthered in every science class.

 

Click to access Vernier_white_paper.pdf

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-probeware.htm