Project 3 Technology

I am going to do Project 3 on SkyWard. It seems like a typical student management program, useful for recording attendence, posting a calendar, or recording grades, but another physics teaching friend pointed out the integration of Special Education paperwork into the program. So, one can find IEPs and other information on what special needs students have right by their names on Skyward. I want to explore how that will streamline the process of keeping track of and giving special attention to students with disabilites. There will be hundreds of students over the years with various disabilities and it will be vary useful to have a more foolproof way of organizing and displaying (to myself , counselors, administrators and anyone with a need to know) Special Ed information for students.

How does a teacher protect his or her students on the Internet? I think this will become a more and more crucial problem as grading and lesson plans are as often as not done on a website. I think the biggest things we can do is use a good class management site/program that is secure. The students' grades (academic internet safety) and possibly contact info (identity internet safety) are on these sites. Keep your own computer password protected and your room locked too!

IP&T Movie

This video will help me teach about collisions and momentum since I can't use a pool table or have car crashes in a classroom.

I skyped with my sister Amanda who lives in New York. It was pretty straightforward to do but our Internet is pretty unreliable so we couldn't chat very long. I think the technology could be very useful in the classroom especially for an expert talking to the students. Say you wanted to have a university professor of physics talk to the students but the only ones you knew were 2000 miles away at BYU, so you could skype and they could show some of their equipment or even some of the research experiments in progress without the safety hazards and travel expenses. I would definitely do this as my only contacts with physics professors right now are at BYU and I plan to teach in Pennsylvania. I also have a brother-in-law who is physics PhD and a hurricane expert for NASA and he works in Maryland. It would be possible but not easy for him to visit a class so I could skype with him and he could talk about some of the actual applications of physics today.