How well does it work?
Graphing Stories works very well. As long as a teacher or student has decent internet connection, all the videos will load quickly and play smoothly. Also, getting to Graphing Stories is easy--just type in graphingstories.com into the URL will get one to the site. It's also very easy to learn. On the main page, there is a box with three steps to follow when using Graphing Stories that tell the user how the program works. First, assuming the user is a teacher, Graphing Stories wants the user to pass out a handout of pre-made graphs to the students. Then, the teacher will play the videos and have his or her students watch attentively. And last, the students will graph the relationship they see.
Are the written materials well organized and useful?
The written materials are organized and useful for helping students graph and then assess their graph. Each video is only fifteen seconds long, and each pre-made graph on the handout already has the time (in seconds) labeled on the x-axis with the fifteen seconds scaled appropriately, and each graph is the same physical size. The videos also identify the dependent variable and its unit in each video with an appropriate scale, which students can copy down on their graphs. This can be a good or bad thing--if the students are just learning about how to graph and relating independent and dependent variables, these videos present a proper way to label and scale a graph. However, by already setting up the graph for the students, Graphing Stories takes away some of the cognitive demand of the tasks. It also limits the students by telling them the relationship it will graph when students may see another relationship they wish to graph. However, the best aspect of these graphs is that the videos graph the relationships at the completion of the stories on the same sized graph. Students can see the exact graph and compare the shape of their graphs to the graph of the video and know immediately if they graphed a relationship correctly or not (but once students see this, if working individually, they will just skip to the ends of the video and graph the correct graph without actually going through the task).
What are the purposes and goals of using this technology? Does the technology reach this goal?
The program is all about graphing correctly, which means students must reason quantitatively between variables and then model that relationship correctly. This program helps develop fluency in graphing, and this technology partly reaches this goal. Of the videos that I've seen, about two-thirds were bad videos. I couldn't always reason quantitatively because, in the video, I couldn't get a grasp on the quantities. For instance, in the Costa Rica swing video, a lady falls from a platform high in the air and then goes in a giant arcing swing motion. To me, the height that she gets after the first arc seems to be around the same as the height of the platform, but the graph after this story shows her going much higher off the ground than she looks. In video game story, it took me about six seconds to even find the action figure guy when I needed to reason between height off ground and time. Again, here I couldn't quantify the height when he went to the ceiling, because the ceiling only looked like twenty feet high, but my graph was off when the ceiling was actually forty feet high. In some videos, it was meant for the user to identify certain weight amounts on an electronic scale, but it was very hard to see this amount on those videos. Because it was hard to get a sense of quantities in some of these videos, I don't think this technology reached its goal. Graphing Stories really wants its students to graph correctly, but when it is hard to get a sense of quantities that one must reason between to get a correct graph, it is hard for students to reach the goal of this technology.
Is the technology relatively easy to use?
This technology is very easy to use! It took me less than five minutes to explore the site and understand it. The "three steps for how to use this program" box made using this technology very easy. All one has to do is watch the videos and graph the relationship.
Does this technology enhance or extend the teaching and learning process for the intended mathematics concepts? How and why?
Graphing Stories can enhance and extend both the teaching and learning processes. It all depends on the choice of video of the teacher. Some of the videos are excellent, like the time of the clock and bench press videos, but some are not. If the teacher chooses the correct video that is clear, where students can get a sense of measurement, where they understand the context and variables involved, and if the problem makes sense to them, then the students can reason quantitatively and practice modeling situations. Also, watching the video at half-speed a second time through helps students reason between the quantities. Teachers can give students practice reasoning quantitatively by determining what variables the class looks at--for the bench press video, what if students related height of the bar to the total distance the bar has traveled? This small twist makes the problem harder and really gets students to reason well. Better modeling skills then result from the quantitative reasoning, as does making sense of relationships, because students can model from their reasoning and use that to interpret the relationship they have. This technology as a whole may not enhance learning too well, since it picks the variables and scales for the students and then shows the correct graph (so students may not choose to struggle with this math if they know they will see a correct answer within two minutes of starting the video), but if a teacher wisely uses just the good videos, and shows his or her students only those, then students can benefit from them by having to make sense of relationships, reason quantitatively, and modeling.
Would you recommend this product for purchase to a school? Why or why not?
This technology is free for all to use, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to teachers. Some of the videos are good, but most aren't very clear. Also, I wouldn't want to give my students a pre-made graph, but I would want them to create their own graph with their own scale. I also wouldn't immediately give them the variables at which we are studying, but I would want them to create a graph based off whatever variables they want to relate. I also wouldn't always make time the independent variable, because it is often much easier to reason quantitatively with time as the independent variable. I would also stop the videos from showing the correct graph when doing a whole-class activity, because many students will probably wait until that graph comes up to draw it so that they know they are getting a correct answer. However, this site does have videos from a myriad of contexts which keeps the math interesting, but there are probably better videos to show students to get them to reason quantitatively and model.
Graphing Stories works very well. As long as a teacher or student has decent internet connection, all the videos will load quickly and play smoothly. Also, getting to Graphing Stories is easy--just type in graphingstories.com into the URL will get one to the site. It's also very easy to learn. On the main page, there is a box with three steps to follow when using Graphing Stories that tell the user how the program works. First, assuming the user is a teacher, Graphing Stories wants the user to pass out a handout of pre-made graphs to the students. Then, the teacher will play the videos and have his or her students watch attentively. And last, the students will graph the relationship they see.
Are the written materials well organized and useful?
The written materials are organized and useful for helping students graph and then assess their graph. Each video is only fifteen seconds long, and each pre-made graph on the handout already has the time (in seconds) labeled on the x-axis with the fifteen seconds scaled appropriately, and each graph is the same physical size. The videos also identify the dependent variable and its unit in each video with an appropriate scale, which students can copy down on their graphs. This can be a good or bad thing--if the students are just learning about how to graph and relating independent and dependent variables, these videos present a proper way to label and scale a graph. However, by already setting up the graph for the students, Graphing Stories takes away some of the cognitive demand of the tasks. It also limits the students by telling them the relationship it will graph when students may see another relationship they wish to graph. However, the best aspect of these graphs is that the videos graph the relationships at the completion of the stories on the same sized graph. Students can see the exact graph and compare the shape of their graphs to the graph of the video and know immediately if they graphed a relationship correctly or not (but once students see this, if working individually, they will just skip to the ends of the video and graph the correct graph without actually going through the task).
What are the purposes and goals of using this technology? Does the technology reach this goal?
The program is all about graphing correctly, which means students must reason quantitatively between variables and then model that relationship correctly. This program helps develop fluency in graphing, and this technology partly reaches this goal. Of the videos that I've seen, about two-thirds were bad videos. I couldn't always reason quantitatively because, in the video, I couldn't get a grasp on the quantities. For instance, in the Costa Rica swing video, a lady falls from a platform high in the air and then goes in a giant arcing swing motion. To me, the height that she gets after the first arc seems to be around the same as the height of the platform, but the graph after this story shows her going much higher off the ground than she looks. In video game story, it took me about six seconds to even find the action figure guy when I needed to reason between height off ground and time. Again, here I couldn't quantify the height when he went to the ceiling, because the ceiling only looked like twenty feet high, but my graph was off when the ceiling was actually forty feet high. In some videos, it was meant for the user to identify certain weight amounts on an electronic scale, but it was very hard to see this amount on those videos. Because it was hard to get a sense of quantities in some of these videos, I don't think this technology reached its goal. Graphing Stories really wants its students to graph correctly, but when it is hard to get a sense of quantities that one must reason between to get a correct graph, it is hard for students to reach the goal of this technology.
Is the technology relatively easy to use?
This technology is very easy to use! It took me less than five minutes to explore the site and understand it. The "three steps for how to use this program" box made using this technology very easy. All one has to do is watch the videos and graph the relationship.
Does this technology enhance or extend the teaching and learning process for the intended mathematics concepts? How and why?
Graphing Stories can enhance and extend both the teaching and learning processes. It all depends on the choice of video of the teacher. Some of the videos are excellent, like the time of the clock and bench press videos, but some are not. If the teacher chooses the correct video that is clear, where students can get a sense of measurement, where they understand the context and variables involved, and if the problem makes sense to them, then the students can reason quantitatively and practice modeling situations. Also, watching the video at half-speed a second time through helps students reason between the quantities. Teachers can give students practice reasoning quantitatively by determining what variables the class looks at--for the bench press video, what if students related height of the bar to the total distance the bar has traveled? This small twist makes the problem harder and really gets students to reason well. Better modeling skills then result from the quantitative reasoning, as does making sense of relationships, because students can model from their reasoning and use that to interpret the relationship they have. This technology as a whole may not enhance learning too well, since it picks the variables and scales for the students and then shows the correct graph (so students may not choose to struggle with this math if they know they will see a correct answer within two minutes of starting the video), but if a teacher wisely uses just the good videos, and shows his or her students only those, then students can benefit from them by having to make sense of relationships, reason quantitatively, and modeling.
Would you recommend this product for purchase to a school? Why or why not?
This technology is free for all to use, but I wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it to teachers. Some of the videos are good, but most aren't very clear. Also, I wouldn't want to give my students a pre-made graph, but I would want them to create their own graph with their own scale. I also wouldn't immediately give them the variables at which we are studying, but I would want them to create a graph based off whatever variables they want to relate. I also wouldn't always make time the independent variable, because it is often much easier to reason quantitatively with time as the independent variable. I would also stop the videos from showing the correct graph when doing a whole-class activity, because many students will probably wait until that graph comes up to draw it so that they know they are getting a correct answer. However, this site does have videos from a myriad of contexts which keeps the math interesting, but there are probably better videos to show students to get them to reason quantitatively and model.