New Classroom Resources and Tools

Important questions any teacher should ask are: What resources and tools are currently being used in the classroom? And should additional resources and tools be incorporated into the classroom? The process of thinking about the questions and taking action helps to improve the classroom experience for the students year after year. The current and emerging web tools can be used as additional resources for the classroom. It will take some time and dedicated effort to effectively incorporate the web tools into the classroom. There will be successful integration of some tools and there will be some failures.

A positive result of using the web tools is the students will feel connected to the latest and greatest. Some of the work the students are doing in classroom may seem esoteric to them, but if the tools they are using are at the leading edge of web technology, the students may feel a better connection between the classroom and the outside world. This will not prove to be the great panacea for improved student attention, engagement, and learning, but it will help. I suspect most students like to feel they are learning to use the latest and greatest; after all they are usually the early adopters of the latest technology.

For my classes, I will generally incorporate new resources, tools and technology along with the corresponding new teaching strategies if I can see a way to improve the learning process or add an interesting new twist to learning. Currently I do not rely on the web. In fact, I tend to keep the students directed at specifically focused information. If the information is not focused, then the students tend to get lost and trial off in directions that usually cause confusion.

I do believe there is a way to use the web in my classes that can limit distractions for the students. The general process I have in mind is once the students have developed a reasonable level of competence for a set of properties such as refraction, reflection, and diffraction, they can search the web for every day ordinary phenomena involving the properties. The concept is if the students have proper level of competence, they should be able to differentiate between good and bad information by evaluating the proper usage the properties of a given web site. This will give the students a better change to determine if the information on a web site is viable and allow the student to write a reliable report about a specific natural phenomenon.