Technology and Pedagogy

This lesson is titled "Earthquakes" and is published on ScienceNetLinks.com.  It teaches middleschool students about plate tectonics and how they affect our earth's development over time.  This is an important and fundamental concept that every middle school student should learn, which is why I chose this lesson to explore.  Also this lesson incorporates authentic situations where students are required to collect data on occuring earthquakes and create a map.   
This lesson incorporates most of the New Jersey earth system standards under the strand of tectonics.  It covers the topics of plate tectonics, lithospheric plates, erosion and deposition, geologic events and the Ring of Fire through both teacher- centered and student-centered strategies.  The teacher-centered strategies include lectures on these specific topics and demonstrations on how to collect the data.  This lesson is mostly student-centered with their own research on earthquakes and the collection of earthquake citings and map creating. Most of the research uses electronic sources and the internet to complete the data collecting. 
Two standards that this lesson does not incorporate is the earth's magnetic field and the layers of Earth.  This could be adapted to the lesson by the teacher's explanation of earth's magnetic field and its play on earthquakes and a model of the layers of the earth and where earthquakes take place.


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlEPB9e5Uod9dF9WNnhPSFNMSUF4Y1BSZE9zcmdjb1E&usp=sharing

Electronic Sources

Writing research papers is the hardest assessment for students.  I think about this as I procrastinate on writing my own research paper on paleontology, or fossils.  I’ll admit fossils are not as exciting as you would think.  Therefore it makes it even harder to get excited about writing a term paper on them.  However, thanks to the internet it has become easier to accomplish this task. 

Finding sources for a research paper is the hardest part since it is the starting point.  Over the years the process for this has changed dramatically.  The library used to be the place for this.  You would use the card catalogue to look up the book you need. Once you find it the hunt begins in the maze of books.  I visited the library with this intention but quickly failed when I could not even find the book in the system.  My failure is the result of always using internet sources throughout my education.  

Instead of going through this headache we have the convenience of electronic sources.  We are able to access journals, articles and even books with the convenience of our own computers at home. 

The tricky part is to recognize reliable sources.  With websites like Wikipedia and other Google searches, anyone can post material and publish it as a source.  As teachers we need to show students how to recognize these false sources compared with reliable ones.  Most libraries have links to electronic sources that are reliable.  This is a tool that we need to show our students and even give them websites that they should visit.   

History of Technology in Science

There is so much more to discover that the naked eye can't see.