Moodle, Tablet PCs, and Atomic Models

The other day I wrote about the digital academy students learning to use Tablet PCs in the classroom. Today, I wanted to quickly share a victory for learning.

Students in the digital academy started to download chemistry problem sets and complete them using the Tablet PC. I require that the students ink their work so that I know the work is not a copy-paste of someone else’s work (from the internet or from each other).

Here is a copy of the problem set for the atomic model.

Chemistry Problem Sets

You will notice that the problem sets include a series of questions near the end. Based on answers, my hope has always been to find common mistakes or misunderstandings and correct them. The process has been slow when done by hand. The combination of the Tablet PC, MS-Word, and Moodle (provides the drop boxes) allows the students to complete their work, submit the work digitally, and allows me to grade the assignment.

Important. The presented scenario is possible without Tablet PCs and drop boxes, however, the time to get to the presentation stage would be greater.

A further enhancement is I can now clip answers and easily project the answers to the class. We can discuss answers and hopefully have students reflect on mistakes.

Questions and Problems

1. How is Thomson’s model of the atom different from Dalton’s model of the atom? Draw a picture of each.
2. How is the Rutherford model different from the previous models?
3. What was wrong with Rutherford’s model of the atom? Why did it need to be modified?

This is an example of a student submission.

From the submission, we can see that the student wrote about Rutherford’s experiment and did not answer the question. Next, we can see from his answer in number 3 that the student did not understand the historical sequence of the models (Dalton, Thomson, Rutherford, and Bohr….).

Once these answers were projected, I was surprised by the number of students who thought both answers were ‘correct.’ Even after taking time to dissect the questions, several students remained puzzled. Their interpretation was that the question asked “how” and the answers explains “how” …

Since we are in the early stages of working with Tablet PCs, I’m looking forward to other ways of sharing student answers. Right or wrong, I’m convinced seeing student answers projected made a favorable impact on learning for some kids. Suddenly their work on the Tablet PC became real. They already knew I was reading what they were writing but now they are faced with having to reflect on what they are writing.

Do you use Tablet PCs in your classroom? What assignments have been successful for you?