Probably not on your list of things to keep up with are innovative teaching methods in science and mathematics. However, like rust, NSF never sleeps. I bet you didn't know that circle jack improves math scores. Read all about it:
Understanding Math Classroom Affordances of Networked Hand-Held Devices
PI: James J. Kaput, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth Co-PI: Jeremy Roschelle, SRI International
SUMMARY
Prior SimCalc work exploited the representational affordances of the computational medium to help democratize access to the core ideas leading to and underlying Calculus, important ideas that had previously been sequestered in a capstone course reached by at most 1012% of the population. Simulations, new graphical ways of creating and editing functions, their derivatives and integrals, and dynamic visualization tools together enabled a reconstituting of these ideas into core curriculum beginning in the middle grades. We now propose to study the profound potential of combining the previously established representational innovations with the new connectivity affordances of increasingly ubiquitous hand-held devices in typical classrooms. In combination with the representational affordances and the availability of powerful, robust and inexpensive hand-helds, we see classroom connectivity as a critical ingredient to unleash the long-unrealized potential of computational media in education, because its effects are direct and at the communicative heart of everyday classroom instruction- but only if those effects are sufficiently understood to inform iterative improvement of technologies and classroom practices that support and do not impede learning, as well as design of teacher development and support structures.
With the support of three major corporate partners, Texas Instrument, Palm, and Nokia, we will work with teachers in ordinary grade 812 classrooms equipped with school-standard graphing calculators and newer devices wirelessly networked to each other and to a teacher's workstation. We will examine three Opportunity Spaces generated by classroom connectivity. (1) Assessment: principled diagnostic assessment routinely embedded innstruction based on students sending their responses to carefully designed thought-revealing probes and problems to the teacher for analysis and action. (2) Learning: new and highly engaging student activity structures involving (a) eacher-student and student-student challenges, and (b) student contributions to shared and publicly displayed constructs (e.g., students creating velocity functions on their hand-helds that, when uploaded, control their character n a class marching parade or dance). (3) Teaching: teacher classroom management support for distributing and collecting student work, viewing & annotating student screens, and generally managing the flow of information in the connected classroom.
We will use design experiments to produce a series of classroom-grounded case studies that embody theoretical frameworks and carefully structured accounts of classroom phenomena. These are intended to help guide further design and development as noted, as well as to support further research. The work will take place primarily in ordinary grade 812 classrooms taught by teachers in MA and CA. We will deliberately vary the experience of the initial teachers, and, over time, vary the technology platforms. We will study affordances and constraints at three different time-scales and levels of detail: (1) carefully-designed and closely observed 12 week teaching experiments common across sites; (2) semester-long observations of teachers and classrooms based on occasional visits, teacher reflective journals, and structured debriefing-interviews of teachers; and (3) longitudinal change of the both the teachers and the technologies as they mature together over the life of the project, including comparisons with novice teachers introduced in YR 3.
I was attracted to the document title address:
~/research/proposal/kaput/kaput_proposal_final.pdf
found under, http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/rec/programs/
Chuck Grimes,
desperately seeking something to laugh at.