As teachers, we can help our students understand abstract ideas by allowing them to experience concrete ideas. These concrete ideas need to be representative of abstract ideas. As the students experience the concrete, we as teachers need to help them to connect the concrete representations with the abstract. As we do this, students will continually spiral to higher levels of understanding.
Since most of the material that my students learn requires using a computer, students are confronted with abstract ideas all the time. They have to be able to understand the processes a computer goes through to compute information. I constantly have to find ways to provide students with concrete examples that effectively represent the abstract. I find that the more hands on experience I give my students, the more likely they are able makes connections and understand the abstract subject matter.
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one aspect of computer technology that I have found students to have a hard time understanding is that of web pages. Creating them maybe is not that hard for students but the ideas that an html file is not like a word document and that you have to get the html files and any pictures displayed on the page in the right folders on a web server is hard for people to grasp. What kind of concrete analogies do you use for that?
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