Technology Trade-offs in a Physics Classroom (Alice Flarend)
“Alice Flarend is a National Board Certified Teacher and is the physics teacher at Bellwood-Antis High School in Pennsylvania. She holds a B.S and M.S in Nuclear Engineering from University of Illinois and University of Michigan respectively. Alice caught the teaching bug while doing engineering doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has been teaching for over twenty years. She is currently working part time on a Science Education Ph.D at Penn State. She plans on remaining in her classroom to be a bridge between the worlds of higher education and public K-12 schools.”
One of the first uses of computers in many physics classes decades ago was to graph data using Excel. This innovation prompted lengthy discussions among physics teachers at meetings and conferences about the trade-offs of having students use this aid rather than graphing by hand. Excel could make graphing so easy, but the students could lose the skill of creating axes, legends, and interacting with their data.
I have found these types of discussions distinctly lacking as we move more classroom activities onto the digital world. I want to call attention to the often Technology Trade-offs in a Physics Classroom (Alice Flarend) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: