Education Classroom Library

Enhancing Learning in Science with eZedia and PASCO

February 2003
By Drs. Jane & Michael Madden
Francis Marion University

Science education is one of the easiest ways to engage students. Science is exciting. It can also be very confusing, full of details, and not make a lot of sense if you lack the conceptual map to link information. Research has revealed that the private, unspoken understandings we have of a concept may vary considerably from the accuracy of that portrayal in the real world. So, how do we go about getting students to build better concept maps and letting us know what they're thinking at the same time?

Multimedia tools such as eZediaMX can assist. It isn't the novelty of multimedia authoring that is the power behind it. The impact comes from the resources we can combine in multimedia to craft a conversation about a topic. It goes beyond watching videos and surfing the Internet. This process challenges the student to pull together the information from multiple sources - text, video, audio, graphics, Internet, library, community members - to support a clear line of reasoning. Multimedia gives them multiple ways to expand their understanding of what an ocean is, for example. More importantly, it gives them multiple ways to express their understanding. This is where they make the implicit, explicit! We get to see and hear what they're thinking.

When we combine the power of multimedia as a tool to build conceptual understanding with the incredible resources of science probeware, such as those available from PASCO Scientific, we get a whole new world of opportunities for learning. PASCO has produced an exciting new line of USB probes called PASPORT, which work with very young children right up to university level. When the probes are combined with the DataStudio software from PASCO, teachers and students can create amazing graphs that represent the data they have gathered from their experiments. The graphs produced in DataStudio can be exported to eZediaMX and using the power of multimedia, students can use the path object tool, a couple of buttons, and photos or video clips to annotate that graph and clarify their thinking as to what was happening during the experiment.

What we're proposing is that multimedia authoring, combined with the resources available through technology such as the PASCO probes and software, make logical, supportive partners for learning. We're looking at a multi-step process when it comes to examining a science topic, whether in a formal science class or embedded in another curricular area. The steps we see that could become part of a multimedia science notebook are as follows:

1. Why do we want to know about this topic? How does this matter in our everyday situation?
This gives us a chance to set the stage for what we will be doing

2. What do we know?

3. What do we want to know?

4. How are we going to find out?
Where will we get this information?
What will our experiment be like? (DataStudio comes in at this point)

5. After the experiment has concluded and we've finalized our observations and conclusions in DataStudio, we report back what we did find out.

6. Implications
How does this help us understand things in our everyday world?
What are some "next step" questions?

Once the students have pulled their information together, completed their experiments and considered their next steps, they can use the eZediaMX environment to create additional classroom activities where they can challenge each other to go further. The combination of science probes, especially starting earlier at the elementary level, combined with multimedia authoring, meets a wide-range of standards at both national and state levels in science, mathematics, and technology. Better yet, the students think it's cool!

PASCO PASPORT probes: http://www.pasco.com/PASPORT/

About the Authors
Dr. Jane Madden is an Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Francis Marion University and is the Director of the Grants Development Program on campus. Dr. Michael Madden is a Professor in the School of Education. No remuneration was received for the writing of this article.

http://www.jmadden.info/