Taste of Tech

I’m a sucker for primary sources. Ever since we spent six weeks on Lexington and Concord in high school, I’ve loved looking at the actual documents and artificats from history’s particpants. By examining the actual sources, and considering the points of view of their authors, one may paint a more realistic picture of the time, event, or situation than can be found in an interpreted digest.

Take, for example, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. While it’s widely touted as the document that freed the slaves, a careful reading will reveal that it is more a political document than a civil rights one. A closer look at how the document was viewed its time reveals… No. You don’t want to read my summary of it. Go make up your own mind.

The American Memory Project is one of the best sources of primary documents related to American history. In addition to the wealth of primary source documents, they also have a site called the Learning Page which provides resources for teachers, including featured collections, lesson plans, activities, and professional development resources.

Another great site is the National Archives Site. They have more resources than I thought they did. In their Teachers & Students section, they’re currently featuring the arrest records of Rosa Parks. In addition to the documents themselves, they have standards correlations, guiding questions, and document analysis worksheets.

The primary sources are here. We don’t have to rely on the textbook as the sole, unquestionable source of "correct" information. Teach your students to be smart information consumers, and to question their sources.

Wikibooks is a project for collaborative development of books online.  The focus is on developing free electronic textbooks that students and teachers can use. More than 1,000 books are in various stages of development for just about every imaginable subject.

Looking at Physics, for example, there are four high school physics book projects currently underway, as well as 17 undergraduate and five graduate level projects. Additionally, there are many general science books that address physical science for younger grade levels.

There are several advantages to using electronic texts. They’re freely available online, so there’s no investment in physical book purchases. Even if students don’t have Internet access at home, printed copies can be made available for a fraction of the cost of a traditional textbook. Because these are wikibooks, they’re collaboratively developed. If a teacher doesn’t like how the book addresses a particular concept, she can change the book to make it more clear. If things are missing or incomplete, teachers can make improvements.

In a real environment, it’s likely that teachers would take a snapshot of a wikibook, so the text doesn’t change as the course goes on. But they would still be able to use a new, updated edition each year as the books get better.

They’re not ready yet for use as a primary textbook. They’re not complete enough. But they work well as supplementary material, and the more people who are involved with the project, the faster the books will become serious contenders for replacing the old texts.

You can quickly and easily create nice-looking graphs at the Students’ Classrom Create a Graph site. Sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics, this easy-to-use site allows you to create all kinds of different graphs to help visually represent complex data. When you’re finished, you can print your graph, download it in one of a number of different formats, or email it to yourself.

The National Center for Education Statistics’ Student’s Classroom provides information to help students learn about  math, probability, graphing, and mathematicians. They also provide a wealth of other resources for students and teachers.

This is the second in a series of posts about podcasts for teaching and learning. A number of podcasts are available to help supplement classroom instruction in a variety of areas. This time, we’ll look at math.

The Mathgrad Podcast discusses everyday math for everyday people. The goal is to discuss the mathematics behind many real life topics in a way that even the worst mathphobe will gain some insight. Topics range from the math underlying voting schemes to the mathematics of loan payments.

Dan’s Math Cast is a math podcast for students created by math teacher and textbook author Dan Bach. The show features stories, challenge problems, and clear explanations of the beautiful world of math.

The Math Factor is a short podcast that poses a problem each week. For instance, suppose someone has a bag full of red balls and blue balls. He pulls four balls out of the bag, and they’re all blue. He tells you that there was a 50% chance of that happening. How many balls were in the bag when he started, and how many were each color?

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. I’m so used to listening to podcasts that I regularly try to pause or rewind the radio. It’s a little embarassing when I catch myself changing the radio station by mistake. It just seems natural that I should be able to back it up and replay something I missed or wanted to hear again. It doesn’t help that I listen to a lot of NPR podcasts, and that, when the radio’s actually on, it’s usually tuned to NPR.

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to a live call-in talk show, and thought, "if this were live, I’d call in and make a comment." Turns out, it was live. I’m totally used to consuming information (at least, audio information) on my own time.

Time shifiting isn’t new. In high school, I used to tape Letterman each night, and get up in the morning and watch it before school. That way, I could skip the commercials and stupid parts, still get a decent amount of sleep, and still be up-to-date on what happened on the show. But it wasn’t until recently that some people started using things like TiVo to do it with everything.

I wonder whether the news cycle pendulum is starting to swing the other day. When I was a kid, everyone watched the evening news. There was one newspaper edition per day. The news cycle was a whole day. If it happened after deadline, it’s tomorrow’s news. Over the years since then, the cycles have gotten shorter, to the point where it’s nearly instantaneous now. If a major story breaks, it’ll be on CNN (and CNN.COM) within a few minutes. Since that isn’t fast enough, it’ll also show up on the RSS aggregator on my desktop, to make sure I’m not out of the loop. For a long time, we’ve had a lot of news junkies. We have to be informed. We have to know what was going on in the world all the time.

Now, I’ve taken that immediate, up-to-the-minute news, and thrown it on an MP3 player. I’ll listen to it when I get a chance. I don’t have time right now. We’re back to the longer cycles. I think this kind of thing helps us focus less on what other people are up to, and more on what we’re doing.