Conference Connections

Summary:

As I listened to General Conference, a worldwide broadcast put on by the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints every six months, I noticed a few connections to technology in both the content of the speakers’ talks and also how the conference was broadcasted using technology. One speaker, Elder Quentin L. Cook, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, said, “One adjustment that will benefit almost any family is to make the internet, social media, and television a servant instead of a distraction or, even worse, a master.” In addition to this powerful thought Elder Cook provided, I thought about how unified everyone needed to be in order to translate the conference into hundreds of languages and broadcast the conference in hundreds of countries across the globe. Unity is key in settings both in and out of the classroom when dealing with technology.

As a class at Brigham Young University who all participated in watching the conference, we discussed some of the ways technology was used. Dynamic images during talks were pedagogically valuable, as in Elder Neil A. Andersen’s talk when a dynamic image of a scattered group of dots were turned three-dimensionally and created a pristinely clear image of an eye. This dynamic image provided a powerful analogy to using the principles found in the document entitled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” as the true perspective that comes from living the principles of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. In addition, we talked about four components of technology: Technology as a Master, Technology as a Servant, Technology as a Partner, and lastly, Technology as an Extension of Self. We described the differences of each of these and stressed the importance of understanding the math itself rather than using the technology to just get by, or to get the answer and not really care to learn the mathematics conceptually.

Critique:

We discussed how the fact that the words to all the hymns the congregations across the world are asked to join in on are not displayed as subtitles at the bottom of the screen, as they once were. This technological change is not conducive to a wide and varied audience speaking a plethora of languages and dialects. For English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, it makes following along and singing the English words rather difficult to participate. This is something I would change if I were involved in the technological crew in broadcasting General Conference.

One thing I would like to continue to study out and research further is the idea of Technology as being my Partner. While we discussed technology being my partner in helping me understand the mathematical concepts as I go, and using its capabilities combined with my own, I could not quite pinpoint the difference between using it as my Partner and using it as my servant. However, despite my confusion about this point, I will always seek to use technology as my servant and dabble in having it become the extension of self, depending on whether or not I am learning about the technological power of a certain tool, or if I am using it as a tool in my future classroom.


Connections:

I know that when technology is used as a servant, it is simply there to aid in portraying the message I am trying to teach. It makes it easier for the teacher to explain concepts and students to learn because there is a visual to which the teacher can refer. Students are better able to visualize what the teacher is saying, and they can ask more direct questions having to do with the topic. As a future math educator, I will use technology as my servant. I will be its master instead of it mastering me and my entire lesson. Furthermore, based on the class discussion, I will hopefully reach a point with all the technological mediums I will use, where they will all be simply an extension of myself. It will be second nature to use them all, and students will be edified by each lesson involving technology.

This is the last of the discussions I will have with this particular group of students all learning about technology in the classroom together. As a result, I wanted to conclude with something I always want to remember as a future educator regarding technology. That is—I will become thoroughly familiar with the technology I choose to use as a teacher so that I do not spend class-time troubleshooting it. I want the technology to be helpful and not hinder the precious learning environment.

Spreadsheet Data Exploration

For a long time, I have been at a loss as to the kinds of things Microsoft Excel can do. Spreadsheets full of data are not only organized in specific rows and columns based on categories of some sort (i.e. year, country, etc.), but the data can be duplicated, copied, and analyzed using multiple techniques that are programmed into Microsoft Excel. For this exploration, I took data from the web regarding demographics about Texas and used the abilities of the spreadsheet to create and explore relationships between different sets of data. I was able to see if there were any pieces of data that seemed inaccurate, continue patterns down columns, and analyze how accurate they are compared to actual measured data, and analyze possible relationships between different categories.

Here is the spreadsheet I created to analyze this specific data.

All of the data gathered (and the data I created from the given data) are all from the years 1984 through 2001. In the year column, I expanded the column down all the way to 2024 to hopefully create estimations of certain data in the future. I researched and found the actual data for the year 2017 and compared it to the estimations, and while they are similar, they are relatively fairly different from each other.  I gathered marriages, divorces, births, deaths, infant deaths, and maternal deaths. In addition, I created columns to calculate the marriage rate, divorce rate, birth rate, death rate, deaths from deliveries, and deaths not from deliveries. I created these rates based on the population to make these data sets more accurate, as the population is dynamic throughout the years. In each of these columns of data I created, I took the number of [marriages, births, etc.] and divided it by the product of the corresponding population in column B and 1,000,000, as the values in column B are in millions. I then multiplied this entire value by 1,000 to get the number of individuals per 1,000 in the population that would get married, or be born, etc. I then dragged the cell down and created an entire column with this formulaic pattern.

To format my spreadsheet, I double-clicked the tops of each column to make the width of the column dependent on fitting all the data to make it all visible. I then selected B2 to freeze the top row and the far left column in order to make them stationary as you scroll through the spreadsheet. This helps interpret the data with the years and the category always visible.

Overall, I learned a lot of different strategies to create a helpful Excel spreadsheet in order to analyze data, create my own based on the data given, and make the spreadsheet look presentable.