blog 4

The section “Defining relationships.” from the “Mapping Student Minds” article reminded me of what we did in class the other day with the visual outline as well as the rubric assignment. First we were given an example to work with and then we were given specific assignments to work on. I thought it was interesting to read about how in-depth an assignment related to the environment could be, what with the collection of data, the making and revision of outlines, and the presentations for the different cases that people were making. After reading the article I thought about how the article demonstrated how technology can be used in school, which is what our class is about. Ms. Owen used a lot of technology (the online database, the mapping tool, the Palm Pilot data form, and the WISE database) to help the students sort their data.

At first it was kind of difficult trying to understand the causal maps. I think that was because the arrows pointed up and down but the direction of the arrows did not indicate whether or not the relationship was positive or negative. I felt like if an arrow was pointing up it should indicate a good or positive relationship, whereas with the downward pointing arrows I felt like they should indicate a negative or bad relationship. I looked at the class grade causal map some more and saw how, despite how the arrow that came from “Absence” was pointing upward it was not positive (by that I mean that having a lot of absences would not cause a student to get a better grade). The thickness and red color of the arrow showed that absences greatly decreased the class grade. That helped me understand the causal map better, but I still feel like it would have helped even more if there had been a video clip that showed the teacher explaining the relationships in the causal maps to the students.