Blog # 4

First, I'd like to start out by saying that it took me about 3 or 4 minutes to find the article on iste.org site. But once I did, I enjoyed reading this article. I noticed they learned a few lessons from our "Newsletter aide," seeing that they put the article in three columns for easier reading :) Now that we have that out of the way.... Let's get to the article....

I found the article to be very informative. I do agree that science is a visual subject, but by incorporating technology into the subject it's adding to the lesson. The standard that this "Causal mapping" is incorporating into the science lesson is a very important one and it is Cause and Effect. Students usually demonstrate this concept during a reading or compression lesson. It's great and very time efficient to be able to use both concepts in one lesson. The idea of being able to let the students go on virtual field trips intrigues me. I am fasinating by that. Especially seemed the article gave me the impression that they are really life-like. Virtual field trips can be a good thing on many levels, the first being every child in the classroom can attend, no hassel of struggling to get all the permission slips back in time, no stressing about who will volunteer to go on the field trips and what parents gets which kids, no worrying about behavior problems once on the field trip or even worse accidentally forgetting a child. These virtual field trips seem to cut out a lot of stress for teachers. Also, the children get motivated and want to collect data plus, it's not a one day event, they can pause the virtual field trip and therefore be more accurate about the data that they found. These sixth grade teachers wrote about causal mapping and science so that even I was motivated, and if I'm motivated I know that my students will be. I liked the fact that they didn't only pin point positives of this technology science lesson they expressed the down points. For instance, a teacher remarked " Instead of trying to guide the students or hint to the right answer, I ask probing questions to get them to thing about the relationships." I liked the honesty in that statement. It is very true, sometimes, it's a lot easier to hint or guide the students into the right answer rather then to have keep going back and forth to the data and hoping that they will eventually come up with the right answer. The concept mapping is a tool that I would like to use in my classroom one day. It reminded of the Inspiration website. I think technology can be a real positive feature to have in the classroom, It will be a change once I start using it and learning about it myself but I can see it has time saving and lesson combining options that can't be beat.