The following is a common question heard around teacher workrooms, teacher lunchrooms, faculty meetings, and science or math conferences.
"Why use web 2.0 tools when teaching science or math?"
The answer is both simple and complex at the same time.
Interactive whiteboards (IWB) allow science and math teachers to teach multi-sensory lessons, seamlessly jumping from one type of media to another. Interactive science or math lessons can easily integrate text, sound, video, and graphics based on the tactile nature of the IWB.
Wikis are the most popular Web 2.0 tool being used in science and math classrooms. Based on a survey of readers - 43 percent use them to support their teaching and student learning.
A Wiki is appealing, encourages participation, supports collaboration, and promotes interaction by students who love to use technology.
By the way - this includes most students today!
Using federal school improvement funds, an elementary school in Pittsburgh implemented an "Academy in Math and Science" program. The Academy allows students to explore science concepts through experimentation. Due to the popularity of the program, the school plans on adding one grade per year.
Learning Science is a tricky art, since you need to focus on skills and methods that take you in the right way to understand the subject. In other words, learning Science in an interesting way depends upon the person who teaches you the subject and the way he takes you...
As many of you may have discovered, I also found that many of my previous colleagues have little use for technology for teaching.
They are mired in excuses such as using technology is cheating, students learn best through lecture, the stresses of NCLB makes it too difficult to do anything but have students memorize facts to pass the tests, etc.
There are many lists going around about what the next decade will bring in K-12 education, especially focusing on those things that will become obsolete. Well, I decided to create my own list of 5 things that should be obsolete in K-12 education by 2020.
PubMed comprises more than 21 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.
Today's college students, often referred to as the "digital generation," use an impressive assortment of technological tools in a wide variety of ways. However, the findings reported here suggest that students prefer more traditional instructional technology for effective engagement and learning. Faculty members, however, prefer the use of course-learning technology offered by their universities or publishers. In addition to this potential mismatch between preferences of students and teachers, the research finds that there are vast differences in preferences and usage across disciplines, in particular, business and economics instructors and students having stronger technology preferences than instructors and students of the fine arts and life sciences.
Constructivist theories grew out of the work of a couple of Russians around the time of the Russian Revolution. It is radical subjectivism dressed up as science, and has no scientific credibility whatsoever. It is used by radical educators to push their barrow that nothing the teacher knows is worth the student learning and that all knowledge is innate. It's bullsh*t. Theories like this rot are part of the reason that the bottom has dropped out of Western education and we have a generation who can't write. This should be resisted by any educator with an interest in educational excellence.