Databases!!!

The first article maintains a focus on Filemaker Pro database software. I’ve actually had some experience with this technology and have processed reports of students and groups of students. This form of technology, as dull as the article made it seem, is monumental in our management of children’s education. We can compare students to their peers and interpret loads of information not available to us several years ago. However, as much as we find it beneficial to categorize students for the sake of time and effort, we can find fault in that these evaluations are becoming more impersonal. More often than not, students are “strategically” placed in certain classes based on different numbers (usually tests) that fall under their name. It’s true that we make our own future, yet educators ultimately determine the path a child will follow. With programs like Filemaker and Claris Home page, allowing the organization of data and the manipulation of it, teachers can easily manage a group of students and, furthermore, keep them in touch with each other over the Web.
Beth Holmes makes a critical point about children’s education. In lieu of our technology driven information age, children must understand the skills of gathering, organizing, understanding, and then sharing information. This Presidential database project is a simple and effective method of teaching such skills. Though, this article is nearly a decade old, I’m sure there are more creative and interactive database projects. This week’s assignment was a perfect example. As much as teachers can benefit from databases, students will need to know the gist of them in order to succeed later in life.
The third article presents the idea of centralizing a database. Students would literally go to one computer and input their data; in this case it was for reading books. The students could then determine what they were looking for in a book and sort it accordingly. This method is outdated, yet children can participate in similar forums online. This article just emphasizes the power of a database and the importance of encouraging children to organize whatever information possible.
Databases have an enormous effect in our education already. The sole purpose for the advancement of technology is to better the giving and receiving of information. Rooms that were once full of filing cabinets are now shrunken into the size of a laptop. Retrieving mounds of information is also as easy as punching a few keys. This week we worked on the InspireData. I was astounded by the complexities-made-easy as Erika guided us through this software’s many tools. More importantly, though, is the aesthetically appealing aspect of it. Not many things I’ve created are so easy to make appear really hard to do. The ability to configure different types of graphs can make any normal teacher seem like a computer-whiz. I still think that the true benefits of databases can be best used by school administrators, when the school-wide population must be compared, especially when all they really look at is sets of numbers. Within the classroom, teachers can use databases for project purposes and general information storage. By having great software such as InspireData, we can easily broaden our application of technology to databases.