One web resource which I found particularly interesting was www.making-history.com where students are involved in a multi-player strategy game as a means of understanding the economic and political causes for WWII. This tool truly embodies constructionism because it serves as a liaison for students to assimilate and accommodate new knowledge. Given the background students have with WWII, www.making-history.com allows them to experience the complexity of war in a way that is not only meaningful, but works to connect their new ideas with preexisting ones.
Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom
instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
I think students like having some of the decision making power in the classroom. It makes them "own" the responsibility for their education and I think it helps students be interested in what they are learning.
ReplyDeleteInteresting post. I think you touched on the most important aspect of technology and hypothesis generation, and that is the luxury of having technology remove the tedium often associated with the scientific method, for example. Once the students understand how the numbers work and relate, there is little value in having them repeat the same process time and time again.
ReplyDeleteWLutke,
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is little value in having students "waste" time working through the minutia of the work, when the overall focus of the lesson is elsewhere. I often find this in math class. For example, recently we were working on area and circumference of a circle. What bogged th4e students down was not the concept rather the process of squaring and multiplying by hand. It wasn't that students couldn't do it- rather it simply became a time burden if students couldn't use a calculator.
-Katie