Math in Nature

I created this webquest on trackstar which can be found here


Then I created this worksheet using google forms for my students to fill out afterwards.

Useful Apps

I'm currently reading though the Connecticut Common Core Core of Teaching for another class.  I know that my fellow TCPCGers are doing the same, so I wanted to share an application I use a lot called Skim. Its a PDF reader that lets you highlight and mark up the document. You can also do the same thing with nook study, but I'm partial to skim.

Classroom Technology Tips Article

For class this week we had to read an article from edutopia.com that provided a list of ten tips for using technology in the classroom. There was nothing too groundbreaking for me in this article, but it was a good reminder to always be creative in how you think about technology. I have a few points I wanted to highlight.

• The common theme I see between this weeks article and last weeks Alan November article is using technology for communication. Using the Internet provides us with so many variations over the old fashioned pen pals if we know where to look.

• This article also talked about finding your classroom technology experts. I think of myself is being very good with technology and may not need too much help from a technical standpoint in my classroom, but I think its important to see what ways our students can think of to use technology.

• I wanted to ad some things to their list. They talk about using a website as a classroom hub, but they never talk about moodle.org. This is a program that can be installed for free onto the school servers  and is very similar to blackboard.

In which I present you a math video

Maru may be cute, but he isn't exactly math related. I do have to share a math video this week, so I chose a quick review of the Pythagorean Theorem.

iMovie screencast

I used screencast-o-matic.com to make a screencast demonstrating how to put a title over video in iMovie.

I Love Maru

As Lamar pointed out, the internet and cats will take over the world.

In response to Alan November

Another task for this week was to read this article on November Learning.   This article deals with a lot of the questions I was asking in my last post.    It also brought up some interesting points I hadn’t heard of yet.  There is definitely a lot of food for thought.  

In the first section of the article they talk about the notion some kids (and adults) that if something is on the Internet then it must be true.  His story of a teen who reads and believes that the holocaust did not happen may be a bit extreme, but it gets the point across.  I think that all teachers should heed November’s advice,  “In every subject there ought to be a standard exercise of presenting students with different versions of the truth and asking them if they know how to discriminate among them because students now have access to more information than everyone in this room can possibly imagine.”

In the second section, November talks about putting webcams in every classroom.  This is an idea that I find to be a little scary.  I don’t think anybody would want a webcam installed in their workspace, and it really seems a bit too Big Brother in 1984 to me.  November makes several good points about sharing classroom activates with parents and family at home.  I think that webcasting special events that parents are invited to attend in person is a good idea.  If the class does regular presentations, then maybe it would be better to record them and send them home on a thumb drive or DVD. 

November also goes on to talk about parents giving feedback to their kids in real time.  “Through the technology the parent can listen and see the kid. With just a standard computer with a built-in microphone, the parent can talk to the kid and can send notes.”  Once again, I think this is good for special occasions at school, but I would be weary of letting it go to far.  I am afraid that this would be a tool that helicopter parents would take too far. 

In his article he talks about requiring every student to take a course online.  I think this is a really good idea for schools that aren’t able to provide higher level classes to their students.  This would give schools the option to group together AP classes and give more kids the opportunity to take them.  Schools could also give kids the option of taking some collage courses online.  I don’t think online courses could take over for 100% of the school experience, but I think it would be useful in rural areas where students have long commutes into school.  Maybe have one day of school as an online day.  Maybe you could even use online classes to have school during weather emergencies where otherwise school would be closed for days.  There are certainly many, many ways to utilize online classes.   

The last comment he made that I’d like to talk about was, “Staff developers, please don’t train teachers to use technology without kids. Ask every teacher to bring two or three students. The trainer trains the students, not the teacher. If you train teachers in technology, they tend to go back and do what they always did -- they will automate.”  I think this is a brilliant concept.  If you show the kids what the teachers have at their disposal they will be asking about it, and probably come up with completely new ways to use the technology. 

I think the bottom line is that technology isn’t going anywhere and teachers need to accept it.   If we can manage to not only accept, but latch on to all of the tools new technology gives us we can give our students a better learning experience.