Information and Communications Technology The Electronic Database. Its potential as a learning, teaching and administrative tool

‘Constructing’ understanding  Provide an interesting, relevant, and meaningful context for students to construct their own understanding of what a database is, what it can do, how it facilitates learning  Build on prior knowledge Telephone book, classification of music by genre, artist, album.. (MusicMatch, CDDB) Telephone book, classification of music by genre, artist, album.. (MusicMatch, CDDB)  Provide a context for students to construct an understanding of the process of turning data into information Personal database and Graveyard database Personal database and Graveyard database Data query process Data query process Hypothesis making and testing Hypothesis making and testing Opaque data useable information Opaque data useable information

Introduction to databases Definition – Any set of related information or data Examples: Telephone books What is John Jackson’s number? Whose number is ? Discuss limitation of paper based databases

Demonstration of Shells database Introduce Shells Database Demonstrate database structure fields and records Query process sorting, nesting sorts Selecting - ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’… hypothesizing, hypothesis testing, data into information, Other databases CDDB, MusicMatch database structure Discuss power of electronic databases

Developing a personal database Choose context for database Contact details music collection, class details, journal articles? Creating new database Naming DB, creating and formatting fields, key Saving structure Data entry Debugging, editing DB structure

Developing a graveyard database Graveyard visit Data collection Input to database What can this data tell me? What questions must I ask? Data query – how to ask the right questions Tables, graphs Turning opaque data into understandable information

Administrative and cross-curricular use Electronic class or school database Easy to update - add, edit, delete records, fields Mark schedules The spreadsheet as a database Student’s ideas w.r.t. using a database as an effective learning, teaching, administrative tool Use across the curriculum for learning and teaching weather data, history, archeology, environmental studies…

Strategies for handling student diversity Identification of levels of expertise, learning styles, dominant intelligences ‘Experts’ used as tutors, mentors Group work – experts with non-experts Provision of support structures for strugglers - split classes, different approaches to meet different learning styles Provision of advanced projects for ‘experts’

Information and Communications Technology James R.M. Paul For: Research and Graduate School of Education Southampton University May