Using a "Technology Rubric"

The "Skyping Science" activity from Idea Bank is a perfect example of a Collaborative-Communicate activity from my group's Technology Rubric.  Collaboration, which is key to this activity, is a type of teaching and learning that we chose to focus on with our rubric.  Communicate is one of the verbs we chose to highlight because we believe it plays an especially key role in the sciences and that technology can have a significant impact on this area.

In the "Skyping Science" activity technology plays a crucial role; it enables students on opposite sides of world to not only communicate, but collaborate in real time!  This is truly awe-inspiring and clearly had a positive impact on the students involved.  Students in China and Chicago collaborated on a physics lab using Skype.  There were two key goals behind this activity: first, that students had an opportunity to collaborate and learn from someone in another country, and second to show students that physics is an international language.  As we pointed out with our Technology Rubric, communication (particularly global communication) plays a key role in science because it is an international study.  This activity does a great job of demonstrating this to students by having them experience it themselves!

There are, unsurprisingly, several weaknesses to this activity (as there are to most uses of technology).  First, there is the time difference.  It is difficult for students to collaborate in real time, considering the time difference between China and Chicago.  This meant that it was planned very specifically for two sessions throughout the year.  Also, it involved students either logging on at home or returning to school in the evening, which presents its own potential difficulties.  Another potential weakness is the reliance on technology, particularly a strong Internet connection.  As Held points out, in order for this to work all of the computers must be able to simultaneously video call, which is asking a lot of the Internet connection.  A strong technology staff is a must.

While I understand why only two sessions were set up for the year, I feel that the students could get so much more from this activity if the connection was more continuous.  Perhaps this could take the form of class blogs that let the students stay up to date on each other throughout the year between Skype-Labs.  It could also take the form of lab journals that are published online, so they can share their findings or areas of confusion throughout the year.