Bringing Technology into Physics Classrooms

Through our outreach initiative at Jacksonville State University, we have been supporting a number of school districts in Northeast Alabama to improve the teaching of physics at the high school level. This initiative is part of Project IMPACTSEED (IMproving Physics And Chemistry Teaching in SEcondary Education), a grant funded by the Alabama Commission on Higher Education. This project is motivated by a major pressing local need: A large number of high school physics teachers teach out of field. The main aim of project IMPACTSEED is to help teachers learn and master the various physics topics required by the Alabama Course of Study. Teachers are offered year-round support through a rich variety of program. In this presentation, we want to present ideas on ways of bringing technology to physics classrooms. We have identified a number of ways of bringing technology into physics classrooms, most notably through a series of make-and-take technology workshops that were developed over several years of research. In turn, when the teachers assign these make-an-take projects to their students, the students will be able to see first-hand---by doing, rather than being told---that physics is not a dry, abstract subject. We found this approach to be particularly effective in heightening the students' interest in math and science.