Technology In The Classroom

Education Software

The Limitations of Educational Software

Overall, I am not very impressed by the actions of the educational software industry. After reading the article, "Teacher Beliefs about Educational Software: A Delphi Study," I am disenchanted by the intended purpose of educational software. The article states, "Teachers rely on experts to produce quality instructional material for classroom use with the assumption that these commercial products have been properly designed, developed, and evaluated. However, that is not necessarily the case?and commercial educational software publishers are unwilling to talk when asked about their instructional design process and evaluation procedures." Furthermore, the article describes factors that often lead to poor software selection; teachers lack the expertise to select appropriate software because they lack the technical skills and training to evaluate software effectiveness and the understanding of necessary instructional strategies to incorporate software effectively into their teaching.

I believe there is a strong correlation between "Teaching Strategies" and "The manner in which students engage in Critical Thinking." There our two factors contributing to software integration and HOTS, the software and the strategies deployed by the teacher during software integration.

HOTS are characteristic of a learning process that evolves when students are provided the opportunity to experience. Many teachers "are limiting themselves to instrumental and narrowly defined objectives, such as mastery of essay writing. Therefore, I believe the true definition of HOTS is not simple. HOTS emerge when a teacher begins using instructional strategies "enabling them to refocus their concerns less on the content and more on the process of learning."

Education software can be subdivided into categories based on the approach used to promoting learning. However, after reviewing the course reading, I have concluded, "Mindtools are applications that can be used by learners to represent "what they know" about the content they are studying. I see a broad range of classroom uses for these programs. Teachers currently have access to an array of Mindtool applications, but are unable to develop teaching strategies to incorporate these application programs into their classroom.

Classroom integration will be the downfall with Mindtools. They rely on effective teaching practices to encourage HOTS. Therefore, extensive staff development will need to be incorporated into the integration process.

I believe there is a strong correlation between "Teaching Strategies" and "The manner in which students engage in Critical Thinking." One group member stated, ""Much of the software that can be used as Mindtools does not come with instructions or information on how to integrate this technology in the classroom... Teachers want some type of manual or instruction on how to accomplish this task."

A common weak link in software integration is the classroom teaching strategies used, in conjunction, with the software. Reflecting back to the unit on hardware integration and an approach to technology integration found in the article, "Increasing interactively in lectures using an electronic voting system."

"The conclusion was that to apply ICT to education successful, pedagogy had to be put first, technology second. An un-stated implication of this was that we ourselves should look at the teaching practices around us, identify the weakest point, and try to discover how ICT could address these." Replacing ICT with education software will provide a beneficial approach to addressing/identifying our software needs. Therefore, as a classroom teacher, I strongly support the integration of Mindtools to encourage HOTS in the classroom.

Therefore, we have identified the lack of teaching material, instructions and ideas as a down fail of Mindtools. However, some software companies are working to include more teaching materials for the classroom.

1. Databases are Mindtools for organizing information. However, teachers often do not incorporate the use of databases because of their lack of knowledge and a lack of ready to use activities. Tom Snyder Productions is an educational software company that has excelled in providing teacher friendly software that provides an abundance of ready to use activities.

The Software: Maxdata works with excel to give students an introduction to databases.

Product Overview:


Your students will:

Your students will:

Create databases

Collect and organize data

Display, interpret, and effectively communicate data

Manage information and create reports

PRODUCT FEATURES

	Ready-made, cross-curricular data sets: dinosaurs, presidents, states, weather, and more
	Database wizard guides students through naming the database, adding fields and field types, and saving the database
	Three levels of functionality allow for differentiated instruction
	View records in table and group views
	Create standard reports ? table, column, and graph ? or design your own
	MaxPaint - drawing tool to add pictures to records
	Clip art library with over 800 images

2. The Internet is a great tool for teaching students how to do research. However, the teaching strategies deployed by the teacher and the assignment created and implemented, often do not result in successful research or HOT. Therefore, I found the following software effective for bridging the gap between education software and HOT.

The Product and Overview:

The 2003 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia provides easy access to 78,000+ articles at three reading levels as well as a complete atlas, dictionary, and thesaurus. The learning experience is enhanced with thousands of videos, illustrations, panoramas, Web links, and more! Perfect for research projects across the curriculum. Developed by educators, the Teacher's Guide is loaded with carefully designed activities that encourage students to explore and expand their research capabilities. It also provides annotated bibliographies and lists of appropriate Web sites as additional reference sources.

In conjuction will education software, there is an array of teacher friendly teaching materials, free online. The following Websites are great resources on how to integrate Mindtools, Internet Resources and classroom instruction to promote HOTS in the classroom. These activities include lesson plans, as well as, all needed materials. The activities use standard application software.

One activity I plan to use in the classroom is "Information Represented Graphically." http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?ID=U82

In this lesson students participate in activities in which they analyze information represented graphically. Students are asked to discuss, describe, read, and write about the graphs and the information they contain. The emphasis on using components of language is natural for students and helps them clarify the information depicted.

Provided by: http://illuminations.nctm.org/Lessons.aspx

Posted at 01:48PM Nov 13, 2006 by SIMMONS, AMBER in Software  |  Comments[1]