Probes provide a way to collect information from the environment and summarize it numerically. You use a probe when you check someone’s temperature with a medical thermometer or a thermometer that reports the temperature outside of your window. Our textbook devotes considerable space to the classroom use of probes as allowing student participation in authentic activities. Probes were a category of digital tool we emphasized in our expansion of the core ideas we first found in Jonassen’s description of mindtools. We describe an authentic task as mimicking the behavior of practitioners. There is a theoretical explanation for the benefits of contextualizing learning through the use of authentic tasks, but this is type of thing I explain in our textbook and not here.
Probes play an essential role in most sciences and engineering and the data generated are important inputs to mathematical and statistical calculations. Probes have long been promoted for classroom use. I used to see multiple booths at education conferences displaying the probes companies had available and demonstrating some of the types of information these probes could collect. Student use of probes to conduct authentic investigations just seems such a logical fit with STEM initiatives and yet I don’t see the frequent use I expected when these devices first became available for classroom use. Again, probes represent another of the mysteries of why some ideas catch on in education and others do not.
My recent example of the multi-function power consumption monitor would be the last example of a probe I have used. Here is another example of a probe (heart rate monitor) that you may have used personally applied to a novel investigation. The links at the end of this example offer access to some of the companies providing probes for classroom use.
Probes = another opportunity for student data collection.
