Teaching Temperature with Technology

In recent years it has become very popular to introduce computational tools and/or simulations into the classroom. While the intention of this classroom addition is often meant to help elucidate a particular physical phenomena, teachers at ALL levels --- whether graduate or undergraduate, secondary- or middle-school --- may miss important \emph{teaching moments} by either relying upon or struggling with the technology! I will demonstrate this phenomena with a sample teaching module developed at our instiitution that seeks to discover the relationship between temperature and latitude by having students gather data (e.g., average monthly temperature for a chosen city) from various world wide web resources. This task may be very difficult for students and teachers for reasons ranging from slow connection speeds to an inability to plot and interpret data.I will wrap up by demonstarting a simple Maple routine that will produce the graphs easily and discuss ways in which this kind of top-down solution may be the best bet for using and teaching technology at all levels.