Paper or plastic?

We're digesting a delicious meeting with our Teacher Advisory Group (held Friday 11/14/08 at GMRI with 11 teachers in attendance).

We used a "speed dating" approach to get our teachers chatting. Burning program development questions were on tap.

The fieriest of the questions turned out to be whether or not teachers would have their students take their laptops into the field with them to collect data. Jessie Campbell - Monhegan Island School - creatively summed up the dating results (see photo) to kick off a lively group discussion.

A few discussion highlights:

• Would a student with her nose glued to her iBook notice the caterpillar crawling across her foot? The elephant stirring in the underbrush?
• Paper and pencil gains "lost art form" status
• No-peeking poll results: 2 would never take iBooks out, the rest would (with some serious, unsettled waffling)
• Eliminate data "creation" in the classroom with this simple statement: "Don't make up data, you turkeys!"
  

After listening closely, here's where we think we are, sweetly summarized for us by Sarah K:

1. We know that not all teachers will bring computers in the field. Even if all grew comfortable with taking computers outside over time, it would be a huge barrier to bringing new teacher on board if we required computers to be taken outside.

2. We know there is some (superficial, perhaps) appeal to scientists about students collecting data electronically in the field (opportunity for data quality enhancement with program interactivity, etc. - although I checked this today with one of our scientist advisors and Jonathan wasn't convinced that the computer in the field would make that big a difference).

3. We know scientists themselves collect data in the field using paper and pencil.

4. We need to establish expectations and strategies for achieving expectations around data quality, data integrity, etc. These concepts are essential components of scientific practice. Ruth's suggestion of creating exemplars for outstanding, mediocre, and poor data records would be one important stragegy. Another - developing activities that introduce students to the database, website, and program in such a way that they get the true scientific nature of the project.

5. We need to explore the various ways we can check data quality (comparing student teams' data to one another to check for agreement and/or outliers that might indicate data "creativity").

6. We know that having students take computers into the field requires steps that introduce significant opportunity for trouble.

7. We know that there is real value from an education perspective to keeping the field experience focused on a student's connection with his environment.

All that leads me toward thinking that we need to concentrate on #4 - establishing expectations and strategies for achieving them - instead of applying our limited resources to make the laptops work outside and address the associated issues (#6).

Seems this one is just heating up! Stay tuned.