Blog #8

The use of databases in education is extremely helpful not only for teachers, but for students as well. Teachers can use databases to organize information based on student performance and other things. For example, a teacher who wanted to know the effects on student performance can create a database using different fields such as hours of sleep, hours watching t.v., and so forth. Students can use databases to also organize information. For example, a student conducting a study based on animal sleeping patterns can gather information and organize the results a lot easier using a database. This week, we utilized a program called InspireData. Among other database programs, InspireData is the easiest program to use. InspireData has a number of amazing features. For example, a user of InspireData could easily create a venn diagram that shows a correlation of any two fields. Users can also organize records using different colors or pictures. Honestly, I have never used a database before. My first time using a database was this week actually. At first, I was intimidated because I had no experience using a database. However, InspireData made it easy to create a database.
The article titled "The World Wide Web" has some useful information. The main reason why teachers avoid using database in their classrooms is because most database programs are expensive. Also, teachers lack experience using database programs. The article gave a few pointers on how databases are useful. Databases are useful in that databases allows teachers to create discussion groups in which students answer through a respond button. For handing assinments on the web, web interface is a mechanism that organizes assignments and sends the assignments to one place. Teachers can create web based evaluation forms and calendars.
The article titled "The Database America's Presidents" basically explains how a database is an effective tool to organize information. The article explains how students should have the 6c's characteristics, which are compute, communicate, conclude, confirm, categorize, and classify. Computing, communicating, concluding, and confirming are the techniques of problem solving. Categorizing and classifying are the techniques of managing information. A database is an effective tool to collect and organize information by defining data fields. The article provides a great example. The article uses America's Presidents. The database fields include: president's name, age, schools, etc. The data collected on the presidents can be arranged, sorted, filtered, manipulated, and so forth using a database.
The article titled "Bells and Whistles" explains how databases can be useful to students for both creating and accessing information. The article also hints that it is important to have the right database software. ClarisWorks is one of the commonly used database software. ClarisWorks forces students to think about their data in various ways. Using ClarisWorks has different fields in which students can define fields as pop up menus, values, check marks, and so forth.