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About Gizmos
About Gizmos
Gizmos is an interactive online platform that stimulates case studies for students to test their knowledge and problem solving abilities. This opens the doors of the science world and gives students the opportunity to enact as scientists and solve real-world problems.
Skills-Based:
Analyze
problem solve
Educational standards based
Stimulation
Real-world learning experience
Pedagogical Approach
Pedagogical Approach
Gizmos is an interactive and cognitive developmental platform. Gizmos takes on a multi dimensional approach; cognitive and social constructivism, inquiry based and problem based learning.
Constructivism: Students build their schema as they engage with in-depth content in a multimodal fashion.
Gizmos takes the scaffolded, inquiry-based and problem solving approach in developing students' sense of inquiry through enjoyable, interactive activities. Students are exposed to a real-life issue and are required to create plausible solutions based on their findings (Merchant, N. 2019).
https://www.dreamstime.com/pedagogical-approaches-method-practice-teaching-especially-as-academic-subject-theoretical-concept-mind-map-text-image295273075
Features of Gizmos
Virtual labs: Students undertake lab simulations to expand their knowledge and create explanations.
Case studies: Students are presented with cases that involve guided-inquiry based activities.
computer simulations: Students are able to create models and apply scientific laws.
A variety of assessments such as mix and match, short answer responses and multiple choice responses are used to asses students' knowledge and skills.
Student data is sent to the educator in real-time to track student's progress.
Responses are generated in set colours; red, green and yellow to indicate students' quality of answers.
Feedback can be provided immediately.
Cases and expected responses are accessible for teachers to review.
Technology Affordances
It is important for teachers' to determine whether the quality of the platform is capable to facilitate the desired course outcomes.
The 'action potentials' of technology, this refers to the underlying properties of the platform that determines how the technology should be utilized in an educational and/or social-classroom setting .
Media affordances:
Students are able to read through science handbook
view images, lab demonstrations, visual methods.
Students watch short content based clips
Write short answer responses and communicate their conclusions and summary as a case report.
Listen to instructional audio.
Spatial Affordances:
Move and drop answers
Resize video and images
Temporal Affordances:
Students' can playback video.
answers and information is saved in students' glossary so they can access it anytime.
Anytime-anywhere access on the phone, tablet and computer.
Navigation Affordances:
Students can easily transition to the next slide.
Easy to navigate and browse cases.
Access-control Affordances:
Teacher enrolls students into the class. Teacher manages and observes students' progress and quality of performance.
Benefits for student's learning
Virtual lessons promote interactive environments, engaging learning experience, immediate feedback and student exploration (Reiten, L. 2017).
Feedback from students suggest that:
Gizmos positively influenced students' learning
It is easier to understand the content, the visuals support their learning
The concept is explained in simpler language
Students' are able to see the intended results without human error and malfunction.
However, 80% of students felt that they learn better from hands on labs compared to virtual labs.
For this example, I have uploaded a case on water contamination.
CC: QATreatment be470 Water Contamination Engineering Design at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YztWopR2d0 by Sadaf Azimi
References:
Bower, M. (2008). Affordance analysis–matching learning tasks with learning technologies. Educational Media International, Vol 45, Issue 1, pp. 3-15.
Merchant, N. (2019). Virtual experiments and simulations in the science classroom.
Reiten, L. (2017). Supporting Teachers' Use of Virtual Manipulatives. The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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