The Tech Committee met in the evening of January 19, 2005. Ernie Chamot, Susan Camasta, and Wayne Lindquist were present.
Technology in Science Classes. Sue Camasta, a Hinsdale High School chemistry teacher, uses computer technology in teaching science, and has been invited to speak on the subject at the National Science Teacher Association meeting in November. She discussed her experience with the rest of us in the Tech Committee, and demonstrated some of the uses she makes of computer technology, and whether we could help Kennedy benefit by sharing her expertise.
Sue uses computers with various sensors to record data directly (into a graph, table, etc. for analyzing by the students) in lab experiments. She showed the "Screen Workshop" interface of "Data Studio" (a program that interfaces with PASCO sensors, and produces tables and graphs and calculates least fit, slope, etc.) that she has been using for some time, and recommended it as being "kid friendly" and "not fragile." A huge variety of sensors is available, including temperature and pH probes, of course, but also: accelerometer, altimeter, barometer, charge, CO2 gas, colorimeter, conductivity, O2 (dissolved or gas), drop counter, EKG, flow rate, force, freefall timer, goniometer, heart rate, humidity/dew point, ion selective, light, infrared, ultraviolet, magnetic field, mass, motion, reduction potential, pressure, respiration rate, sound level, spirometer, thermocline, time-of-flight, turbidity, voltage/current, and weather. These all connect to a computer via a USB port. Our understanding is that Mrs. Croco at Kennedy has some of this ability to collect data into a TI83+ graphing calculator via a few "CRB" cradles, but this lacks the software tools for manipulating, printing, analyzing the data, etc., that the full computer system offers.
Sue also makes extensive use of the internet in teaching science. She has a website at:
that she uses, not only to provide her course syllabus, review sheets, etc., but also to incorporate online resources: links to an interactive page to practice balancing chemical equations, online periodic tables, tutorials, etc. She has also collected several links to interactive animations. For instance, one link to a Berkeley simulation shows the motion of gas molecules, and how they mix. Instead of just "learning" the Kinetic Molecular Theory from a book with static diagrams, they see how it really works, and can play with temperature, mass, pressure, etc. at their leisure, to see what the gas laws really mean:
In addition to existing web resources, she has been working with a University of Illinois Chemical Engineering graduate student to develop additional animations to demonstrate things like reactions and atomic theories. Sharing these resources with Kennedy teachers could be very helpful.
Another example of useful visualizations, is that in 8th grade science, Kennedy students learn the difference between "heat" and "temperature". Heat is the total kinetic energy of motion of the molecules in a material, and temperature is a measure of their average kinetic energy. But memorizing this definition doesn't mean much, without some idea of what this "molecular motion" is. Ernie showed some of his visualizations at:
These are from computational chemistry simulations, that show the molecular motion, and the difference between hot water (with evaporating molecules) and cold water, and that there is even molecular motion (ie. heat) in solid ice. He had demonstrated these and some other things about chemistry to 8th graders as a guest speaker at Kennedy in the fall, and the kids seemed to get a lot out of it.
The Hinsdale school district (in a cooperative partnership with IBM) has a "tablet" computer for every teacher. In addition to being portable and useful to display things to the class via an overhead LCD projector, the teacher can draw or write right on the (touch) screen, and with "Windows Journal" software this shows up on the document. A teacher can, for instance, write on the original electronic document, such as showing the class how to work out the answers to a test (as one would use an Elmo and mark on a hard copy of the test), but then the handwritten marks also become part of the electronic document, and this can be posted online as an answer sheet.
Sue would be available to share her experience using computer technology in teaching science with Kennedy staff, if there is interest. She could give a presentation or lead a workshop or discussion, perhaps as part of an institute day, or by some other arrangement. (She also mentioned there is a County Science Institute for K-12 scheduled at Nequa Valley for March 4th.)
Kennedy Website. Updating team webpages with the students in Webquest is still a drawn out process. One thing we would like to do, to reduce the amount of guidance the students need to get from their teachers, is to identify any standard content that all of the teams would agree should be on every team site. We had scheduled a meeting to discuss this with the team leaders, and see if there was any consensus, for January 6th, but this meeting needs to be rescheduled. The Tech Committee discussed what content to recommend, from the parents' point of view, be adopted as standard on each team's webpages.
At the basic level, we agreed that all pages within a team's website should link back to both, the team homepage and the Kennedy home page. We felt that it was sufficient for only the Kennedy pages to link back to the district website. Each individual page should also list when it was last updated (even though the team pages currently all get uploaded/updated at the same time.)
Content to be discussed with teachers includes: Team Information (newsletters, awards, grade level, expectations, etc.); Teacher Information (picture, biography or other introduction, philosophy, rules, contact information, etc.); and Subject Information (objectives, syllabus, homework assignments, grading policies, internet resource links, etc.). If there is a consensus, one or more of these could be implemented in a standard way for all teams.
As parents, we agreed that contact information is important. At the beginning of the year the team pages could also be particularly useful to us, in getting to know our child's teachers. Evidently most teachers in the district would just as soon not have their pictures posted, but several do have a brief biography or introduction or philosophy statement on their team webpages that would be useful. The suggestion was made that, rather than have each team implement some sort of introduction for each teacher, and try to update changes at the start of the year, that a separate area of the Kennedy site have a page to introduce each teacher, and then the team pages just point to the appropriate teacher page. Then when teachers change from one year to the next, the team pages can be updated at the start of the year by simply changing where they point, instead of having to redo entire webpages. (New teachers, of course, would have to have a webpage added.)
We liked Ralph Chapman's latest solution to providing teacher contact information, without exposing email addresses to harvesting by spammers:
but the layout needs to be a little different. (The frames prevent the use of the drop-down menus.) Something like the mock-up at:
Ralph is modifying his script.
District Website Redesign. The kickoff meeting, to officially start work on redesigning the District 203 Website, is scheduled for Thursday morning, January 20th. The 203 Website Redesign Steering Committee will be meeting with the contractor, American Eagle. Ernie Chamot, having served on the Website Redesign Subcommittee last spring, is representing Kennedy on the Steering Committee. The surveys we distributed in November have been helpful, and the initial communications with Tracy Oliver (Steering Committee chair) confirm that one of our biggest concerns will be a major goal of the redesign: to eliminate or minimize the bottleneck for uploading content and to distribute responsibility for individual webpages.
In the Hinsdale school district, teachers can upload to their own website on the district at will. All Sue has to do is place web pages in her "public.html" folder. Along with free access, of course, comes full responsibility for what appears on her webpages.
Next Meeting. There are getting to be more and more conflicts with our meeting time, but the next Tech Committee meeting is still scheduled for:
Return to Tech Committee page, reload KJHS home page, or NCUSD 203 web site.