Teaching with Gizmos - Part 1, The Purpose of Gizmos

The Teaching with Gizmos Series:
Part 1 - Purpose | Part 2 - EGs and AQs | Part 3 - Settings

As a teacher, you are probably accustomed to the traditional tools of teaching – textbooks, calculators, a chalkboard or dry-erase board, an overhead projector, paper worksheets/quizzes/tests, etc. It’s not too tough to see how you can use these items in your classroom. They’re pretty self-explanatory.

But what of these ExploreLearning "Gizmos"? What are they for? Gizmos are nice-looking and interactive, sure, but what value do they add?

What is the main purpose of Gizmos?

Gizmos are designed to help students develop a deep and lasting understanding of key concepts in math and science through inquiry and exploration.

To support this goal, Gizmos offer features that make it easier to do several important things.

• Dynamic visualizations — Gizmos with sliders, for example, allow students to vary a parameter quickly and easily. In many Gizmos, students can see many graphs, or try many experiments, very quickly.
• Data gathering and calculations — Many Gizmos automatically take measurements, record data, and calculate a relevant formula or two.
• Inquiry learning — With their dynamic nature, and by providing data and calculations, Gizmos remove many of the obstacles to teaching in an inquiry-based way. Students can perform many trials quickly, observe patterns in the data, and draw conclusions.
• Diagrams — Gizmos make great-looking diagrams for you, so you don’t have try drawing them on the board. This is particularly helpful for complex diagrams, like three-dimensional figures.
• Screenshots — The screenshot feature can help you make handouts, worksheets, quizzes, and tests more easily, and they look great too.

[Image above: Mary Lou Rothman of Centreville High School discusses ways to incorporate Gizmos into the classroom.]

The thing that really helps pull all these benefits together, though, and where Gizmos take on their greatest power, is through good questioning.

Most Gizmos are open-ended and rich in content, ideal for student exploration and discovery. They are perfect for "what if…?" sort of explorations with your students. The key is to guide your students to what's interesting and pertinent in a Gizmo, and to ask questions that will lead students to really think about those concepts.

The more you ask your students to "go deeper" — to analyze, connect, generalize, predict, explain, compare, etc. — the more you are encouraging students to really use their brains. This, in turn, is more likely to help your students understand and retain the content.

Creating lessons using Gizmos

We offer resources to help you design lessons using Gizmos, and then to assess how effective those lessons were in producing student learning. The most important of these are the Exploration Guide and the Assessment Questions.

The Exploration Guide

Most Gizmos come with an Exploration Guide (EG). In general, the EG is a combination of instructions for what to do with the Gizmo, and then questions for students to answer. The EG provides you with our suggestion for a good lesson with that Gizmo.

If you take a close look at some of our EG’s, you’ll notice a couple key things.

• EG’s don’t take the approach of telling students what they need to know, as a textbook might. Instead, through a careful sequence of experiments and questions, they aim to help students uncover key concepts through inquiry, using the Gizmo.
• The questions in the EG tend to be open-ended. Our goal is to have students apply knowledge, analyze outcomes for patterns and connections, and synthesize results into a new and more complete understanding.

The Exploration Guide is a resource that you can use as-is, if you like, or you are always welcome to design your own lesson. (EG’s can be copied and pasted into a word-processing program, and then edited however you like.)

Whether your lesson ultimately resembles the EG closely or is mostly original, the key to getting the most out of Gizmos lies in ensuring that the lesson is designed to help the student make connections and uncover the core concepts through inquiry and exploration.

Assessment Questions

After most Gizmos, we offer a set of multiple-choice Assessment Questions. These are intended as a learning check for students. (Assessment results are also available to the teacher through the Assessment Results link with each Gizmo link listed on the Teacher Home Page.) The questions, generally 3-to-6 of them, are intended to cover the material addressed in the EG, and often range from easy to more difficult.

Through the assessment results, you can quickly see which students need more of your time, and which concepts, if any, you should spend some class time re-teaching.

In the next section, Using the Exploration Guide and Assessment Questions, where we will explore teaching with Gizmos in different classroom settings, and the different ways you can use the Exploration Guide and Assessment Questions to your advantage in those settings.

» Continue reading Part 2, Using the Exploration Guide and Assessment Questions.

Teaching with Gizmos

1. The Purpose of Gizmos
2. Using the Exploration Guide and Assessment Questions
3. Using Gizmos in Different Settings