LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
• design a lesson sequence that achieves learning goals by integrating technologies
• reflect on the purposes of technology that you integrate into your science teaching
• design a sequence of lessons or learning experiences that utilise technologies to extend students’ thinking and reasoning in science
• make informed choices regarding the use of technology for curriculum planning, making pedagogical choices and assessing students’ learning.
Introduction
This chapter is a ‘mirror’ chapter to Chapter 1.8. The main goal of this chapter is to provide practical examples to elaborate on and illustrate the applications of the main focus areas of Chapter 1.8. The first two sections in the chapter focus on the different ways in which technologies can be integrated into the science classroom and the advantages that technologies provide for teaching and learning science, in contrast with more traditional approaches. The third section allows you to gain an insight into the use of technologies for extending students’ thinking during inquiry learning. The final section focuses on the ways in which teachers might capitalise on the affordances of technologies and the factors influencing their decisions relating to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Throughout this chapter we have used a combination of specific classroom examples and more generic approaches to allow you to adapt the ideas and strategies to your own teaching context, year level and content area.
OPENING VIGNETTE
Watch the first two minutes of the video clip How technology has changed my science classroom (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdPJ0jHihSg) in which a year 6 science teacher describes the use of multiple technologies in a science unit.
Questions
Take 10 minutes to think about the following questions:
1 What were the main purposes for which technologies were used (either by students or the teacher) in this science unit?
2 In what ways did the technologies provide learning opportunities that would not have been possible without technologies?
3 How has the use of technologies in this science unit made learning more student-centred?
Integrating technology into science lessons
In Chapter 1.8, we discussed the ways in which technological change has influenced science teaching and learning and described the opportunities that this provides to teachers. In this chapter, we provide examples of classroom practice to illustrate how and why technologies can enhance the teaching and learning of science.
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