Bill Z's Blog

Software Review, 2 of 2

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 26, 2004

Software Title: Patty Paper GeometryAcquisition Information: Visit http://www.keypress.com/catalog/products/supplementals/Prod_PattyPpr.html for information. It can be ordered at Amazon.com.

Requirements: $21.95.

Weaknesses: Okay, this is a book and pieces of paper, not exactly software. But, I did find it using the Internet.

Strengths: It works. Discovering Geometry author Michael Serra brings discovery through paper-folding activities to the classroom with his exciting book Patty Paper Geometry.

Uses: Patty Paper Geometry includes dozens of activities that foster cooperative learning, increase students' geometric vocabulary, and motivate kids to read, write, and talk about geometry. Constructions are performed more accurately and geometric discoveries are made faster with patty papers. At the end of their investigations, students have discovered most of the properties of geometric figures studied in high school geometry courses.

Software Review, 1 of 2

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 26, 2004

Software Title: Kseg and Geometer’s SketchpadAcquisition Information: Kseg can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.mit.edu/~ibaran/kseg.html. Visit http://www.keypress.com/sketchpad/evaluation to download theEvaluation Edition of Sketchpad.

Requirements: Kseg was developed, and supposedly runs under Unix. There is a windows version available but it is not practical to use for the average non-technical person.

Weaknesses: Kseg. A person of moderate technical experience can’t get the Windows version to execute in a reasonable amount of time. Geometer’s Sketch Pad. The demo version has too many pieces missing to be of much use.

Strengths: Kseg. It’s free. Geometer’s Sketchpad. The purchased version probably does work, otherwise they probably couldn’t afford to keep marketing it.

Uses: You can spend a lot of time trying to get this software to work. You need to do this up front, in order to avoid wasting valuable classroom time. I’m not sure it is an effective use teachers’ time to individually and repeatedly trip over the difficulties in getting this stuff ready for classroom use. It would probably be worthwhile to see if you could interest a group of teachers in finding and developing for classroom use, tools like these. Then all teachers could use the lesson plans developed for the group. Teachers and students should spend their time doing geometry during the time allocated for math, not playing around trying to figure out how to get the software to load, open, unzip, or work in any kind of limited way. Several books on the use of and uses for Geometer’s Sketchpad are available at Amazon.com.

Website Review, #5 of 5

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 30, 2004

Site Name: Google

Site URL: http://www.google.com

Author Information: Originally some Stanford grad students. Now a commercial interprise.

Requirements: Just Internet access with a browser, I used Internet Explorer running under Windows XP

Weaknesses: Information overload. Searches return information based on a mysterious priority that has a lot to do with who is paying to have their sites promoted. Just try Googleing your own name.

Strengths: Google is probably the most commonly used search engine on the Internet. It is able to search an enormous amount of website information in sub-second time. In most cases, I don’t bother to find a URL for even common sites like the IRS. I just Google “tax forms” and the site is easily found. The URLs for most of my previous website reviews were found this way.

Uses: The use and misuse of search engines should probably be taught and practiced starting in elementary school. It is just a part of technical literacy, possibly becoming as important as traditional literacy.

Website Review, #4 of 5

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 30, 2004

Site Name: Census Bureau

Site URL: http://www.census.gov

Author Information: The federal government.

Requirements: Just Internet access with a browser, I used Internet Explorer running under Windows XP. Some of the information requires an Adobe Reader. Microsoft Excel would be useful as some data is provided in Excel format where it can be further analyzed or manipulated using spreadsheet functions.

Weaknesses: Information overload. It’s reminiscent of the old accounting slogan, “figures lie and liars figure”.

Strengths: An incredible amount of data from the 2000 census. This site contains social, economic, racial, ethnic, education level etc., information. The detail levels include state, county, city, zip code, and many others. There is a section specifically designed to be a teacher’s resource. The link, http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/schoolstate2.pdf, for example has a worksheet for a class research project using census data available at his site.

Uses: I could see this site used as a source of research information for grade school on up. Several academic topics including economics, politics, government, geography, and of course statistics could use information from this site.

Website Review, #3 of 5

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 30, 2004

Site Name: The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit

Site URL: www.detroityes.com

Author Information: As stated on the website: Lowell Boileau is a self-learned fine art painter and computerist. His current major work is "The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit", a 1000+ page site inspired by the transformation of Detroit from industrial to information age city. The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit is hosted at: http://detroityes.com/. Selected as a Yahoo Pick of the Year for 1998 and profiled in the New York Times and Wired Magazine, The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit website attracts over one million visitor sessions and ten million page hits a year.

Requirements: Just Internet access with a browser, I used Internet Explorer running under Windows XP.

Weaknesses: This site may have a narrow appeal. As a native of Detroit, I found it historically interesting, and emotionally powerful. The emotional power may not be present for people without a connection to Detroit, and would then probably be less historically interesting.

Strengths: The strength of this website is that it gives real life examples of the effects of many current social and economic phenomena that may be only vague concepts, with unimagined or poorly understood consequences for many students. These phenomena include:
Urban decay
Middle class (or White) flight
The demise of American manufacturing
The demise of organized labor
Racism in Northern urban America

Uses: I could see this site used as a source of research information for a high school social studies class. In addition to the examples listed above, I think that young people who have not witnessed any of the America’s Rust Belt decay would be intrigued by the magnitude, and surreal beauty of it.

Website Review, #2 of 5

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 27, 2004


Site Name: Science U

Site URL: www.scienceu.com/observatory/articles/eclipses

Author Information: The Science U website is produced by a company named Geometry Technologies. Geometry Technologies was formed in 1996 by three research scientists working at the University of Minnesota's Geometry Center, a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. Their goal was to bring the technology developed at Center out of the academic setting and into the commercial world. Science U is an educational site packed full of useful information and fun interactive exhibits covering a variety of topics in science and math, including astronomy, geometry, and nature.

Requirements: Just Internet access with a browser, I used Internet Explorer running under Windows XP. Java applets required by some of the activities were automatically downloaded.

Weaknesses: A weakness could be that Science U tries to cover too broad a range of topics in too little space. It does not seem to have a focus.

Strengths: The strength of this website may be that it does cover its topics more broadly than some of the specific issue websites I visited in my research on lunar eclipses. For example, see my website review #1 of the Hermit.org website with a section devoted to lunar eclipses. Unlike Hermit, Science U gives a clear and comprehensive description of both the differences and similarities between lunar and solar eclipses. It also explains how the orbits of the earth and the moon are on different planes, and the effect this has on when and how often lunar eclipses occur.

Uses: I used this site as a secondary source of information on lunar eclipses to verify accuracy of the information I already had, and to see if I might have missed anything important or particularly interesting to my students. There are several other potential classroom uses for the website. For example, one section gives step-by-step instructions on how to build an icosahedron (a 20-sided geometric solid) of any size as a class or at-home project.

Website Review, #1 of 5

Bill Zawacki
Ed 436 Technology Across the Curriculum
November 26, 2004

Site Name: Hermit.org

Site URL: http://www.hermit.org/Eclipse/http://www.hermit.org/Eclipse/why_lunar.html
Author Information: As stated on the site: Hermit.org is a non-profit organisation, owned and operated by me, Ian Cameron Smith. It's basically a forum for anything that takes my fancy: my own interests, friends' stuff... whatever.
This statement provides no information about the author’s motives and credentials. However, the site provides a clear and comprehensive description of a lunar eclipse, without an overwhelming (for a middle school audience) amount of unnecessary detail. This met my requirements. I am not worried abut the accuracy of the information. I am willing to accept it as accurate, because it agrees with my knowledge of lunar eclipses from other sources, and the information is easily obtained elsewhere if questions arise. I also have no reason to suspect that the information could be tainted by the author’s motives.

Requirements: Just Internet access with a browser, I used Internet Explorer running under Windows XP. No special plug-ins or additional software required.
Weaknesses: A weaknesses could be the limited scope of the information. For example, see my website review #2 of the Science U website. This website contains detail about how the orbits of the earth and the moon are on different planes, and the effect this has on when and how often lunar eclipses occur.

Strengths: The primary strength of this website is that it addresses precisely the information I wanted to deliver to the students about a lunar eclipse. The website went into considerable detail about the shadow zones (penumbra and umbra). The lab assignment involved constructing a model to measure the length of time that the moon would be in the earth’s shadow. It also pointed out that when the moon is in only the penumbral shadow, and no part of it is in the umbral shadow, the moon’s appearance is very little different from the completely unshadowed moon. It might not be detectable to viewers on earth. The information in the Oregonian gave the times of the beginning of the penumbral eclipse. When observing the actual eclipse, one (particularly an impatient middleschooler one) might have concluded that there would be very little to see based on what was visible at the beginning of the penumbral eclipse. The total eclipse was in fact very dramatic and easily visible to the naked eye that rare clear October evening in Oregon.
This information in the website was transposed and delivered to the students in the form of a lab handout. The website’s function or its application to the classroom was not particularly relevant.

Uses: I used this website as the source of information I wanted to deliver to the students about a lunar eclipse.

I would like to do a presentation on the use of Comic Composer, one the Student Materials found in the ReadWriteThink website. Specifically I would like to show how it could be used by students in a middle school science class to produce a lab report.

The benefit would be that for the students whose work is usually so messy that the content is lost, or severly diminished for the reader, Comic Composer could be a useful tool to improve how their work is received. The students who already can produce legible attractive reports, will discover another potential media tool.

I intend to base the lab report on a middle school science lab lesson that I presented for an Ed 538 Science Methods MicroTeaching assignment earlier this term. The lab involved setting up a scale model of the recent lunar eclipse using various sizes of styrofoam balls, a light source, and some solar system distance information. My idea is that students could use Comic Composer to produce the lab report illustrating how they set up their model, and what they learned from the experiment. In my Technology Across the Curriculum presentation, I intend to demonstrate how Comic Composer could be used for this purpose.