Why Use Technology to Teach Science and Math?

Posted by David Wetzel

Using Technology in the Classroom

As many of you may have discovered, I also found that many of my previous colleagues have little use for technology for teaching.

They are mired in excuses such as using technology is cheating, students learn best through lecture, the stresses of NCLB makes it too difficult to do anything but have students memorize facts to pass the tests, etc.

So what are the advantages of technology?

Technology has tremendous power to help students obtain, organize, manipulate, and display information. Students can use technology tools (such as word processing, database, design, and graphing software) in the same ways as do professional scientists and mathematicians.

Using technology for meaningful activities also helps integrate a variety of disciplines, more closely resembling activities that people undertake in the world beyond the classroom. For example, word processing is a real-world technology that can help students develop better writing and thinking skills.

Using the computer, students write longer, more complex sentences and are more willing to revise and edit their work; they are able to concentrate on the thoughts they want to express rather than the mechanical skills of penmanship, spelling, and grammar.

Using technology in science and math class promotes learning activities in which students work in small groups rather than in isolation or as a whole class demonstrations. The technologies used in the classroom are not those designed explicitly to teach basic skills, but rather are real-world applications that support research, design, analysis, composition, and communication.

For example using Google Docs to collaborate on science laboratory reports, data analysis, and presentation of findings.

Another example is using classroom Wikis in Science and Math for collaborating on projects and sharing their findings.

A third example is use Twitter or Skype to communicate with students in other locations to collaborate on projects and assignments.

An Example of Teacher Resistance

Three years ago I was hired by a school district to teach middle school science teachers how to integrate Calculator Based Laboratory (CBL) Probeware in their curriculum.

After four weeks of providing staff development and in-class support regarding how to use these data loggers, with the eight science teachers in the school. The science teachers began to come up with strategies and techniques on their own for integrating CBL Probeware data loggers in their lessons.

At the same time all the teachers confided in me that they had all agreed in advance that using this technology was a waste of time and that they would resist every step of the way.

I was taking back by this statement, I thought that the integration difficulties in their lessons were due to not understanding the technology.

Their minds were changed as they discovered their students were more interested in science experiments, grasped the technology quickly, better understood concepts, and were able to make connections with other concepts. The teachers also found out that they were not behind in their curriculum and students scored better, on average, on chapter tests.

Fast forward to today, CBL Probeware has expanded to all areas of the science curriculum and has also moved into the math curriculum in selected areas as real-time data loggers.

So What Does This All Mean?

Students today are more technologically literate than many of their teachers. Today’s students have grown up in the digital age; they use Facebook, they Tweet, and they use the Internet for almost everything.

Instead of resisting technology, the goal should be to harness the technological energy in students and become a guide for the best ways to use technology to learn.

Any suggestions?