The Active Class

I’m at the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meeting this week, and picking up a few good tips on ed tech in the physics class.  Yesterday, Ed Price gave a very nice talk regarding the use of technology in the classroom.  “The pedagogy is not the technology,” he told us – that is, the teaching technique is not embedded in the tool itself.  When trying to consider what technology to use, take into account:

1. The affordances. What does it do for you?
2. The constraints. For example, the PhET simulations restrict what you can do, but they restrict it productively (productive constraints).  You can change the voltage of the battery, for example, but not the color of the wire, focusing your attention on the important aspects.
3. Tools shape what we do. If we’re using a motion detector, we’re going to focus on measuring the motion not, for example, the data analysis.
4. Enable new possibilities. Again, the PhET simulations let us see the electrons moving through the circuit, which we couldn’t usually do.
5. Tech tools are not deterministic. Even though the tools themselves suggest a particular use, you can adapt them to do what it is that you want to do.

He reported on his institution’s experiments with tablets and  digital ink – hand drawn, on the fly, digitally created images and documents.  For example, if you’re going to make a circuit diagram quickly for class, it doesn’t need to be perfect. So, digital inks and tablets are particularly well-suited for physics class. The internet and software allow us to share and archive this digital ink.

In a typical physics lab, students use a lot of different tools that are notwell integrated, including lab equipment, computers for taking data, and lab notebooks.  So, instead, he uses digital lab notebooks with a tablet PC.  He uses Onenote, which enables students to embed images and data and hand-drawn objects with typewritten text.

There were some challenges, of course.  For one, there was only one tablet per student table, so only one student would really be running things when tablets were used in group work.

A low-tech way to let all students have their hands on a “tablet” is to use erasable non-digital whiteboards – you know, the old-fashioned pen and physical whiteboard.   You can use this to draw a graph, make a sketch, or work out a problem. We’ve used this at Colorado, though have had trouble getting it to work well.  We’ve since seen it used really well at Oregon State, suggesting – once again – that it’s not the tool, but how it’s used.  But even with this low-tech tool, technology can be helpful.  Ed Prather uploads pictures of the whiteboards with the final problem solutions to a course-specific Flickr account.  Students can tag or comment the photos in Flickr, though he admitted that this didn’t happen that much.  One positive outcome was that students started to care a little bit more about whether their whiteboard had a correct solution, given that it was going to be posted in a public forum.  Before, they wouldn’t bother to correct something that they had wrong on the whiteboard.  But now, the photo would capture a correct and complete solution.  While getting the answer isn’t always the point, this would push students to consider their problem and correct it, like reviewing homework for errors and learning from one’s mistakes.

Ed Price is currently experimenting with using Wii remote-controlled whiteboards. Students interacting with a large whiteboard as a group looks neat.

One more word of wisdom from Ed – “Pretty good isn’t enough.”   If the software is just “pretty good” that doesn’t make it good enough for the classroom.  You want it to work well, and work all the time.