Week 2, Post 2: Wireless laptops in education

My next source for this week comes from
http://etc.usf.edu/plans/lessons/lp/lp0099.htm.

This is a very simple site containing a lesson plan for integrating wireless laptops into the classroom. It is hosted by the Educational Technology Clearinghouse at USF. See http://etc.usf.edu/ and http://etc.usf.edu/plans/default.htm for more ideas and subjects.

This lesson is designed for a class where all students have access to laptops and wireless internet. The basic idea here is to use the graphing program on iBook to help students visualize how slope changes a line, and how slopes of parallel lines and perpendicular lines are related. Students make a guess about the rules, graph a few lines, and then see if they are correct. Of course, this sounds like an activity that could be done with graphing calculators, which is true. There are a few reasons, however, that the computer is better. First of all, students can save all of their work! They can take notes and store them for later, as well as save equations. Also, students can take the laptops home, do their homework, and submit it online! It greatly reduces paperwork and probably makes it easier for the teacher to grade. Additionally, the screens on computers are much nicer than those on graphing calculators – they are much larger and several lines can be graphed at a time and in different colors. Another reason I like this assignment is because computers make it very quick to graph. When one is doing a discovery lesson about slope, you don’t want the kids to spend half their time simply graphing the line. The assumption here is that they already know how to do that. Time is saved by having the computer do the graph instead, and students can focus on how slope effects the lines rather than whether or not they graphed it correctly.

I chose this lesson because it is a great way to use computers in a math class. It’s not an activity that will take all period (or several) as some of the Webquests I posted about earlier do. It’s simple, easy, and students can see results right away. The graphing program helps them to visualize the line, which is something so high school students struggle with. I wonder, however: what kind of school has funding to provide every single student with laptops?! At my school, we hardly have funding for books. I had to fight this year for whiteboards, much less laptops! Aside from that, however, it is a great way to get students motivated and familiar with working on the computer. It increases understanding of math concepts as well as builds computer literacy – both very important skills for tomorrow’s leaders.

It was fun to read about one way to introduce the concept of slopes of parallel and perpendicular lines. I just covered this topic a few weeks ago, and the students struggled to remember which rule goes with which types of lines. This may really have helped them to remember. Now if only I could get my hands on 55 laptops...

The main link for this website came from http://etc.usf.edu/plans/lessons/math4.htm, where there are plenty of other math-related laptop activities. I would like to write about several of these, as they are all fantastic ideas, but I’m not sure it would be fair to count lesson plans linked off the same site as separate sources. It’d make me feel like I was cheating. However, take a look at this site in addition to the specific one about graphing – there are several fantastic ideas.