Judith S. Goodrich
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Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other and we need them all. Arthur Clarke (1993, Sri Lanka Speech4)
Integrating technology is an essential part of this unit. The unit’s theme about the growth of cities and the impact of the Industrial Revolution is also about technology, or “ the application of knowledge to develop tools, materials, techniques, and systems to help people meet and fulfill their needs.” The purpose for integrating technology in this unit is to encourage students to use information from the world-wide web judiciously; to use technology tools to help answer important questions and to evaluate and analyze the material they are reading online with a critical eye.
The websites included in the unit are often interactive and can illustrate the workings of a combustion engine or a steam locomotive to students far better than a one-dimensional illustration. Although this unit will be implemented in a classroom where each student has access to his own laptop everyday, it should also be possible to use computers in the library or computer lab and have the students work as teams.
What factors should students consider when analyzing their topics? What will help the students analyze the good and ill effects of progress as it ties into their selected topic? To help them focus, students will use an online causal mapping tool and a visual ranking tool developed by Intel to guide them through the ‘thinking’ process. These free online tools can be located by searching with the terms Intel and Interactive Thinking Tools or by checking the electronic resource list in the bibliography. Creating causal maps will help students formulate questions for research; creating visual rankings of data will help students organize their thinking about the positive and negative effects of progress on society.
In addition to Intel’s Seeing Reason and Visual Mapping Tool, students will be using Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Word and Publisher and Inspiration Software’s Concept mapping program. A teacher without these resources in her classroom can adapt the format of the performance tasks to be just as effective with note-taking, charts, webs, posters and oral presentations.
Another aspect of technology in the unit will be to demonstrate some actual heat engines to the students. We are limited by safety guidelines in the school to using a tea candle as our source of heat. Students will make simple ‘putt-putt’ steam engines out of coiled copper tubing, a makeshift boat, and a tea candle and test them in water. We will look at a test-tube Stirling engine that uses heated air to ‘work’. (See Figure 1) We also will look at a plastic model engine called the Visible V-8 (an old toy saved in the attic for forty years which is still available from Revell for $60.)