Utilize Technology

              I have learned that there are a lot of technologies and different ways to implement them into the classroom. I had never thought about the difference between the teacher solely using the technology and the students solely using the technology. I believe these technologies can be quite beneficial in the classroom. The use of technology can take a somewhat boring or complicated subject and bring it to life when used effectively. I believe I will use technologies such as Microsoft Excel, and PowerPoint in my class. I also believe I will try to use technologies such as the Navigator system with TI calculators and Geometer’s Sketchpad. These technologies can be used by either the students or the teachers to help students understand the relationships in math and the real world.

            I believe that the internet is a great resource even though one must be careful. There are so many math resources on the internet: such as online manipulatives where students can see the relationships and how they change. These are great resources for students and best of all they can be found and used for free. So even if my school system does not have software such as Geometer’s Sketchpad or the Navigator System then I can still have my students interact with the math by using these online resources. The internet is also a great resource for ideas for teachers.  I also liked all the great ideas of using technology to keep in contact with parents and show off student work. Showing students work off can also cause students to own work and to do their best. I think technology can help students own their work and knowledge.

             I believe I took away a lot of knowledge about technology in the classroom and a lot of great resources from this class.

http://www.edutopia.org/change-attitude

This website provides some good ideas for using technology in the classroom. These ideas will help get students engaged with the class and the content area. But as a new teacher these ideas would worry me due to classroom management issues. I would also be worried about taking too much time with these activities and getting off of my pacing guide so that I would not be able to get through all the standards or SOLs. But I feel with some good planning and experience that this could be used successfully. This would just worry me as an inexperienced teacher.

http://www.edutopia.org/global-education-international-exchange

I agree that hands on and real world resources can be useful in the classroom and makes the content seem real to students. Finding things that relate to the community will help students relate even more to the problems. I agree that it is important to focus on the content and the global skills the students will get out of the technology. But I think it is often easy for a teacher to forget this and just focus on the fact that the lesson used some technology. I think a teacher often uses technology as supplementary for a lesson to reinforce the lesson. Otherwise a teacher may just use the technology so that they can write it off as a modification or just to say that technology was used. This site provides links to some services that may be useful to a teacher.

I believe this site overall has some good ideas and can be a useful resource.

            This past weekend, I attended the VCTM Academy at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. I was surprised that there were not more sessions dealing with technology. I was surprised that the overarching ideas of the sessions did not have more to do with technology. The sessions dealt with important topics but were basic topics. I guess each session could have included its own technology portion.

            I attended Dr. Mason’s session on Geometry in a Collaborative Setting in Middle Schools. I had already went over many of the geometry ideas with Dr. Mason in the past, but it was interesting to have the collaborative settings mixed in as well. This session mixed in some technology when talking about different disabilities and ways to help students. One technology that was shown in the session was virtual manipulatives. Also many other hands on manipulatives and ways to use them effectively in the classroom were shown.

            This “Academy” or conference helped to show me that professional development sessions are not as bad as some teachers make them seem. I am sure some opportunities for professional development are better than others but I enjoyed attending the conference. Dr. Mason’s session had many things that could be applied straight to the classroom without a lot of extra work on the teacher’s part. I believe it is important that conferences such as these provide lessons and activities that teachers see as applicable to take back to the classroom. Dr. Mason also provided a cd of the handouts so that not only did one have the paper copy but also an electronic version that would be easy to change and redesign as needed. I think that having something to take back to the classroom is important to teachers when they attend conferences. Conferences such as these can really help a teacher look at something in a different way and find a new approach to teaching an old subject.

      A webquest that might be useful in my placement is titled: “Can you hear me know?”. The webquest is about trying to find the best cell phone plan. The student must run a cost analysis on one plan for each company. The students must construct a graph and write an equation for each line. Then the students must study their “clients” and pick on company for each client. Then from within the company two plans much be chosen for each client. The students must then run a cost analysis for each client and present the information. The link to this webquest is: http://eprentice.sdsu.edu/S04X/scase/wq/index.htm . I believe this could be used in my placement since the class that I have observed at my placement is Algebra 1 part 2. This webquest really brings in the real world application since high school students are definitely concerned over their cell phones even though they may not currently be thinking about the cost. This webquest definitely involves math and algebra. The algebra is especially present in the graphs and equations for the lines. To implement the webquest, the students need access to the internet both during school and after school. I think this webquest should be worked over the course of at lease a couple weeks, where some days in the classroom will be devoted to the webquest more than others. I believe one problem would be students having access to the internet after school. Another problem could be a “free rider” in a group. I think some students may feel overwhelmed and have a hard time staying on task. The class time used to work on the webquest could help with these problems. I feel that some students may need extra guidance but this can be provided for by the group and the teacher during class time. I feel like some of the major obstacles will be if the student has internet access at home as well as keeping the groups on track to work on the project at home as well as at school.

          One website that I have viewed in the past and knew that I wanted to rate was http://illuminations.nctm.org/ . This website is sponsored by the National Council Teachers of Mathematics. This particular website provides mathematics educators activities, lessons, standards, and other web links for resources. This website definitely qualifies as a good website. This website has good information that is credible and the lessons are at the appropriate level that each is labeled. The lessons and activities are interesting and some are applicable to the real world. These activities and lessons also apply to math standards. This website is appealing as well as easy to navigate and use. The website is also current. The website is broad in that it covers all age groups in K-12 math. The site breaks it down into topics based on Standards and Strands. This website is easy to find, and everything is free even for non-members.

            After reading the information on Webquests, I wanted to search and look at some webquests since I have never seen one. I used the provided website to search for some secondary math webquests. I found several different webquests fitting these criteria. I found some to be quite interesting with such real world applications as: which is better to buy or lease a car. I decided to evaluate a webquest that is about buying your first home: http://questgarden.com/45/79/1/070120175316/t-index.htm . The webquest I believe is pretty good but could use some improvements. It has some good information and seems that it would be interesting to the students. The layout of the website is quite simple and could use some improvements and only seems to include the bare minimum items necessary but it is organized. The site is accessible and easy to use. I felt the website could have included more multimedia and been more appealing with color and graphics. I feel the topic would make a good project for students of this age and it is related to real world problems. This is something students might not learn in another way. I am still not sure from the information that we read on webquests of how this should be properly utilized in the classroom. It seemed by the info that this was to be the main part of the daily lessons, but I feel that it is more an outside of class assignment to be completed over a couple of weeks. But, I feel it is not meant to be the main lesson in classroom for that amount of time. I feel this would be a valuable activity for secondary students.

            I went to my placement for the first time this past Friday (February 8, 2008). Even though I knew my cooperating teacher, I was nervous to be in the class for the first time. I was worried how the kids would act and respond while I am in the classroom since I am so close to their age (since I am doing my practicum in a high school setting). It also made me anxious that the fact the class I was observing is an inclusion class. The class is Algebra 1 part 2, so the class includes from freshmen to seniors. This is something that I have not experienced much of except a couple of my freshmen classes. I felt that the class went rather well although the teacher felt it was a little more rowdy than usual. I guess I always thought inclusion classes would be so hard to balance and help all the students move forward in their learning and understanding of mathematics. It seemed that in the short time the teacher had been teaching this class, (since they recently changed semesters) she had really gotten to know the kids and what they need. The guided instruction and guided example problems really seemed to keep the students on track. The student allowed for good amount of wait time so that an unsure student was allowed to answer successfully. Students participated often in discussion of questions. The teacher brought together the ideas of the day (graphing lines, slope, and y-intercept) with a hands-on activity of working in groups to match graphs with the correct equations. This seemed to work for all levels of students, but the number of matches to be made was somewhat overwhelming to some students. When debriefing after class, we decided splitting this task down so that there were less pairs to be made would make the task a little less daunting. I felt the class was rather open to my presence in the classroom which made me more confident and less nervous. I really look forward to going back to my placement this upcoming week.

I guess that I have never really thought of the idea of using blogs in a mathematics class. I know that the use of technology in the classroom is becoming more and more popular. But when thinking of using technology in a math classroom, I thought of using the Internet to research math concepts, online manipulatives, graphing calculators, and other equipment for a graphing calculator. So it was an interesting idea to think of how I could use a blog in my mathematics classroom.

 I explored several of the blogging sites provided and I saw at least a couple of ideas that I felt could easily be used effectively even in a mathematics classroom. I first explore the blog about Pre-Cal ( http://pc4sw06.blogspot.com/ ) since mathematics is my content area. I really like the way the site was set up with all the links on the side that the students can use as references. But, I had a hard time getting much else out of this website besides that I liked the fact of trying to get the students to blog about their math experience. I felt like the blogging part of the website could have been utilized more to discuss other things.

 One of the other blogs that I explored was Ms. Higginbothan’s Weblog ( http://www.butlerville.net/3a/ ). I like how this teacher listed activities at the school as well as homework assignments. I felt like this was great, but I felt that the students could have been allowed to do more for this weblog.

 So, I decided that I like the idea of something in between the information provided in these two weblogs and that this could be used for any subject and practically any grade level. I believe that I could use something like this in my classroom. I would like to provide a weblog containing plenty of links that can be used as reference. I believe that I would like the weblog to include a page listing the homework assignments. One thing that is becoming more common in mathematics classrooms is to keep a mathematics journal, but with weblogs I think this could effectively be done online. Part of the students could be to comment on the weblog of what the student had learned in the previous class. This space would also provide a place for parents to check and see if their children had homework and what the students did in class for that day. This will provide the parents with a idea of a topic to talk to their children.  I believe in these ways, that a weblog could be an effective tool even for a mathematics classroom.

I am definitely not a geek when it comes to technology. I guess I am a little reluctant when I am learning new technology because of doing something wrong. Though once I get use to the new technology then I usually enjoy it and use it often. I feel like technology can be a great tool but it can also be quite frustrating when it does not work. When I am having trouble with technology then I often call on my boyfriend since he took many computer science courses in college. Most of the time we can figure out the problem. In my own high school experience we did not use a lot of technology. When I was a junior in high school, my school put smartboards in some of the classrooms. I believe that these can be great tools when used efficiently in the classroom. The NCTM has a lot of interactive learning math games on their website.

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