It is good to have some practical examples of what the ZPD might look in a math class. Boredom on one end when math is too easy and anxiety on the other end when math is too difficult. The ZPD looks like a pretty narrow target and I believe it is going to take some practice to hit the bull’s-eye and engagement is critical!
Going to the computer lab was a good example of how we might engage some of our students in different ways. Geometers sketch pad was a lot of fun and would allow some of our students a different entry point for geometry. I need to review my geometry vocabulary as I had my kite and rombus a bit confused. Using DASL in conjunction with Fathom 2 was a great combination for engagement for statistics and graphing. We have already talked about how using real data can allow students to connect and create meaning in ways that “made up” data sets does not allow. I think analyzing data is lot more important that being able to graph data and this is a brilliant way to enable that to be easy.
I did ask my high school senior and he has never used any of these tools. He attends a pretty resource rich high school (Issaquah), so it does give me pause about the cost or feasibility of schools using these to engage students. He does have the same TI graphing calculator that he has used since middle school. Although he has never hooked it up to a probe to do motion analysis, he has done something similar with Loggerpro that he tells me is pretty cool. My understanding Loggerpro allows a variety of sensors (thermometer, ph, etc) to plug into hardware that connects to a computer for graphing. So maybe it will eventually be at our fingertips, or smart phones.
Cost for most of what I showed you the other day is minimal. Many schools have the tools in their districts but either teachers don't even know they are there, or don't know what to do with them. An example, I had a teacher tell me that her school had equipment and asked me to take a look to see if I knew what it was. There in a closet, covered in dust was thousands of dollars of probes which could be connected to calculators and used for math and science. None of the other teachers knew they were there because they were in this closet in another teachers room. The teacher was in her first year, it was the teacher that left who knew about them.
ReplyDeleteLogger pro is the computer version of what I was doing on the calculator.