Information visualization tools are very important to
incorporate into our lessons. An
information visualization tool is a visual tool that allows a student to view,
analyze and understand challenging information.
My area of concentration is mathematics.
Some examples of information visualization tools in math are graphs,
pictures and using manipulative tools. All
of these visual aids help students think about and understand crucial and
complicated topics such as sine and cosine functions and the Pythagorean Theorem.
Some things that we should consider before we incorporate
these information visualization tools into our lessons are our learning
objectives, the way our students learn, constraints you have and the context in
which the tools are used. The learning
objective will state what the goal of the lesson is and if a specific information
visualization tool is appropriate or not.
To use an information visualization tool appropriately you need to know
who your students are and how they learn most effectively. We need to know if our students have the
ability to use the information visualization tools in the time given. Some specific constraints that we need to
consider are time and if you will have the resources. Resources can be computer lab time to see
interactive graphs or software to draw pictures. The last thing to consider is the context in
which the information visualization tool is used. An example would be if you already were using
a visual aid then would it be appropriate to use another one. As teachers we need to figure out how we
could incorporate both.
Once we know how to successfully incorporate these information
visualization tools into our lessons we need to figure out the best way to
assess our students. Assessing the way
our students use these information visualization tools is not very different
than the way we normally assess them. We
need to make sure they know how to analyze and understand the information they
are presented in the information visualization tools. An example of this would be drawing a picture
to represent distances from three points of a right triangle. Then the students would have to identify why
they drew the picture the way they did and how the Pythagorean Theorem is
applied.
Sean,
ReplyDeleteI wanted to comment on your post because I am a social studies major and I feel like math and social studies cannot get anymore opposite in terms of content. When I read your post I found a way to connect these subjects because of the information visualization tools you were discussing. For social studies teachers it is hard to find ways to make the content more interesting for students, but I feel that this way you discuss could be incorporated into the social studies classroom in some ways. When you suggest examples like graphs and pictures, I immediately thought of population or demographic graphs or old historical pictures that social studies classes tend to use. Also, for geography, being able to manipulate maps or create pictures can help them get a better grasp of the information.
I really agree with your ideas on understanding how a student learns before they can even attempt to use these tools. I always think it is important for teachers to understand that not every student learns the same way and these visualization tools may be helpful for some more than others. I also like how you address the assessment part of these strategies and that it relates to a regular assessment in terms of making sure the student analyzed and understood the information. I was glad I was able to make a connection between the math and social studies classroom and how the same technology in both can really enhance a students experience with the information.
I forgot about all of those technologies that make math such a visually dominant subject. Using those graphs was a real challenge for me and my classmates and maybe more time should have been spent on learning how to use the technologies that went with creating those graphs and reading the data. Having visual aids definitely helped me to understand the material yet I never considered a situation where those resources might not be available. It must be very challenging to teach some of the concepts that are so visually without some of these technologies. A lot of times interacting with the technology was how we gained experience with the subject too.
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