Final Reflection

I went into this class hoping to learn some simple technology to enhance high school math lessons for all types of learners. In the first half of the class, I learned more about Google Sites, PbWorks, Google Presentation, Google Drive, Blogger, and Dropbox. However, I already use Dropbox, Google Drive, Blogger, and Google Presentation prior to taking this class. In the second half, I learned for the first time how to use ActivInspire, Inspiration 9, and iMovie.

Four of my favorite tools that I learned in this class include ActivInspire, Inspiration 9, iMovie, and Google Sites! ActivInspire can create interactive exercises for students who like to be hands-on (especially good for kinesthetic learners). Inspiration creates concept maps for visual learners. iMovie creates videos that can capture students' interests and teach concepts in an engaging way. Google Sites creates neat websites that contain useful resources and information about classes (also a great way to communicate and organize information to students and parents!). I will definitely use these four tools in my future classroom (probably also Blogger, Google Presentation, and Google Drive)!

Digital Storytelling

Our last technology project is creating a short video on our content area. It's my first time using iMovie and it is a great tool for quickly putting together a video or a timed slideshow with music. I made my video to introduce the fascinating topic of the Golden Ratio (see my video above!). I really like the number of special effects (for text and photos) and themes that is available in iMovie. I also appreciated how easy it is to add and edit the music and pictures. However, I found that some text effects were difficult to work with as they cut off the words that exceed a certain length (even with the smallest font and size).

Overall, I really liked using iMovie and I look forward to using videos to introduce lessons (using them as "hooks"). However, I will probably reserve videos for introducing units since it might become boring to students when used daily (when I run out of cool special effects and themes).

Fun Making the Class Website

I was so excited about creating a fictional class website that I finished it early (except for the iMovie which I haven't made)! I thoroughly enjoyed making a little website of my own and being able to add my interests and link that to mathematics! I love watching movies and one of my favorite pages I created is the "Math Movie of the Month." One might not realize this, but there are tons of movies out there that feature interesting math concepts and history. And they're anything but dry like textbooks present mathematics to be (in most cases)! Harvard math department has a wonderful collection of math movie clips. Be sure to check them out if you're interested! I think watching movies that feature mathematics is a great way to appreciate the creativity, beauty, and humor in the subject of mathematics. Now I wonder how I can incorporate another one of my hobby (cooking) into teaching mathematics and into my future classroom website.

I would definitely use a class website when I teach. A class website is a great place for both the students and the teacher. For the students, a class website can keep track of all their assignments, supply useful web resources, and help them stay in contact with the teacher. For the teachers, it's a great place to express their teaching style, philosophy, and connect with the students and parents.

Blogging in the Classroom

I'm a big blog fan as I love to read a wide variety of blogs ranging from cooking blogs to teaching blogs to personal blogs! Before enrolling in the teacher education program, I stumbled upon a few teachers' blogs and thoroughly enjoyed reading about their first days as teachers, struggles and triumphs in teaching, inspirations, and reflections. It's a great tool for teachers to communicate with students, parents, and one's community!

Some example classroom blogs I looked at are mostly elementary classes and teachers blog about their field trips, class projects, and school events. It's a great place to jot down class memories and upload photos of student work. However, as I reflect upon my high school math classes, I have a difficult time recalling many "blog-worthy" occurrences. On the other hand, having to keep a blog for a high school math class might be motivator to incorporating more hands-on activities and organizing more community activities. One of my fear with committing to a classroom blog is that I won't have many class events to blog about since the last thing I want to do is keep a boring journal that no one reads. However, I think it's a great place to keep track of all the teaching reflections and memories and it might be fun for both the teacher and the students to look back one day.

Using Wikis inside Classrooms

This entry took a while to brew as it took me a while to warm up to the ideas of using wikis inside classrooms. After doing a resource wiki with the other math education people in our TPTE 486 classes, I saw first hand how resources can "multiply" when shared!

Wikis are great for sharing ideas and resources! A wiki that I found is International Academy's Wiki Gateway. This school and its wiki page are featured on PbWorks under their case studies section. According to PbWorks, International Academy started using wikis for music education and their wiki page has now expanded to include reading, math, sciences, social studies, and various other disciplines/organizations/services. The pages on the front page are created by the teachers for their classes and some are more "evolved" than others (contains more pages). In the pages that are open to the public, the teachers mostly post information and resources for their classes. There are also private pages that are only open to select members.

Overall, I like the idea of using wikis inside classrooms simply because of how many resources and ideas students and teachers can potentially create and share. It is a great tool to encourage everyone in the class to contribute. This can be especially true for soft-spoken and shy students like myself!

Inspiration

Inspiration has become one of my favorite programs that we have used in TPTE 486. It's very easy to use and creates beautiful flowcharts! Today, I created my first flowchart using Inspiration 9 (see my flowchart ). I chose to do my digital diagram on methods of solving quadratic equations because I think this is a great way to organize the information in a visual and informative way. And as we learned in educational psychology, imagery is very useful in helping students store information in the long-term memory (cognitive theory of learning).

What I like most about this program is that it can help you arrange your diagram in "tree," "web," or "split tree" forms. This really makes designing neat diagrams a piece of cake! I can see how this program can be used not only as a presentation method by the teacher, but also as an assessment tool (ask students to make their flowcharts to demonstrate understanding of the concepts) because of how easy it is to use!

First Experience with Flipchart

For the past week, we have been working with a software called Activinspire to design flipcharts for interactive lessons/activities. Having never worked with Activinspire before, I found it quite similar to PowerPoint but with some different "animation" tricks.

I did my flipchart on conic sections (algebra 2) since I thought Activinspire is a good tool for graphing-related topics (see my flipchart). I was pleased that the resource pack had graphing backgrounds and that the pull tag was great in revealing answers to graphing exercises. Working with containers was a bit tricky because it took a few tries to realize that the object to be contained in the container must be small enough to completely fit in the container, or else the container will reject it. Overall, flipcharts take a while to make but could be great for introducing topics that are very visual.

Picasa and Google Presentation

After trying both Picasa and Google presentation for doing simple picture slideshows, I can see advantages of both applications. Picasa slideshow can be done more quickly and easily as you just have to upload the pictures to a Picasa folder and add captions. Google presentation takes slightly more time as you have to create individual text boxes for the captions, but you have more control over the font and size of the caption. I think when the quality of the slideshow is important, Google presentation is probably a better option. And I just love how easy and quick it is to embed both Google and Picasa slideshows to websites and blogs!

Below is a digital scavenger hunt I did using Google presentation. The theme of my scavenger hunt is all about the new food pyramid as I love food and especially healthy food. I admit that it was quite hard to keep my mouth from watering while putting together this slideshow. Enjoy!

Scavenger Hunt

 

This week marked my first experience doing a scavenger hunt for a class. I worked with an elementary education group and we found objects of colors on campus. The process of collecting images was fun and allowed us to be creative (scroll down to see my scavenger hunt courtesy of Picasa). As a student, I always loved art-related projects/assignments--especially when they're incorporated into non-art classes. There's something about being able to be creative, relax a little, and showcase your other non-academic skills that really appeal to me. 

I can imagine how humanities classes can incorporate more scavenger hunt or art-related assignments, but I don't know how much of that can be used in math classes. I've heard about a geometry scavenger hunt as a class activity before as geometry naturally lends itself to arts-and-crafts (asking students to capture images that represent the geometric shapes and concepts), but I can't think of ways of incorporating scavenger hunt/art into algebra, pre-calculus, and calculus classes without being too much of a stretch. I know that math lends itself easily to science projects and other challenging assignments, but sometimes students can use a little breather from so much math challenges. I wonder how art can be used in math classes other than geometry to capture student interests?

Finding the Perfect Amount of Challenge: Inquiry-Based Activity

Versus 

As a student, I was never a great fan of inquiry-based learning because it can be frustrating or it can be so obvious that it's simply not motivating. In fact, I much rather sit back and let the teacher do the work while I "soak up" the knowledge. On the other hand, I can appreciate it in the sense that by forcing me to find out the answers for myself and challenging me, I learned the materials better (even though I was properly "stressed out" from it). As an aspiring teacher, the benefits of inquiry-based learning have been drilled into my mind by both my education courses and the TEAM evaluation rubric.

This activity has been very similar to numerous ones we had to do for the other education classes. In this activity, we had to find web sites for the students to use to answer questions. This is where website evaluation came in handy. Since the websites are to suit my purpose of designing an inquiry-based activity, my priority was to find websites that serve the goal of enriching the students' learning. Since I was not using the information on the website to publish a paper, I was not too concerned with picking only official websites for the Leaning Tower of Pisa (topic of my activity). With my experience of being frustrated with inquiry-based learning, I also wanted to make sure that the activity was not too challenging or too obvious. However, I feel that whether the final product is properly challenging while not frustrating is still a subjective matter (see my inquiry-based activity on my website).

As I reflect upon inquiry-based learning and the process of designing such activities, I often find the task of balancing the amount of challenge to be tricky. On one hand, there's no point of an inquiry-based activity if there's no challenge. On the other hand, too much challenge is very frustrating and exhausting for the learners.  This problem is exacerbated by the fact that learners inside each classroom will be at different ability levels. Maybe an extra credit section could help challenge the high-performing students? And more teacher scaffolding could be provided for lower-performing students? Then again, how do we preserve high efficacy and high self-esteem at the same time?

Thoughts on WebQuest

In our previous educational psychology class, we learned all about how authentic learning tasks are effective in promoting meaningful learning. Instead of rote learning, effective teachers strive to challenge students and promote their critical thinking skills and creativity. WebQuest, by creating a platform for teachers to create and share inquiry-oriented activities on the World Wide Web, is a great resource for teachers who are looking to motivate and challenge their students.

In our class activity, I picked the role as the “altitudinist” because I think higher order thinking skills are important in the real world as we are usually not evaluated on factual recall skills, but our abilities to analyze and synthesize. From looking at some example WebQuest sites, I think WebQuest has great potential to introduce projects to students that simulate real-life scenarios and challenge them to apply what they’ve learned inside the classrooms. It also has the potential to motivate the students by giving them opportunities to be creative and express their points of view (designing brochures, PowerPoint, drawing, and campaigns, etc.). 

On the other hand, I think efficiency is also important as we want to optimize the amount of learning in a reasonable amount of time. Since activities focused on promoting higher-ordered thinking skills often require a big portion of the students’ time, I think WebQuest should not be used too frequently as high school students often have a lot of materials to learn in a limited amount of time. 

Web Site Evaluation

When it comes to picking out a web site for classroom use, doing a web site evaluation is a necessary and critical task. And this activity scaffolds our evaluation process by giving specific guidelines about what to check for regarding the author, publishing body, bias of information, accuracy of information, currency of information, design of interface, and accessibility. It’s essentially a checklist, but also requires the person doing the evaluation to reflect on the checklist to come up with a final recommendation.

What I found really helpful about this activity is that it guides us to think about the all the evaluation criteria in a systematic way (in the format of a yes-or-no checklist). It also leaves room for personal reflection and doesn’t just use a formula to calculate the number of “yes” checks versus the number of “no” checks. Since teachers might have different resources (access to grant money to spend on web site subscriptions) and different purposes for using the web sites (motivation strategies or practice drills), different teachers could have different recommendations for the same web site and be equally justified in giving their ratings. This reminds me that even in the subject such as mathematics and science, reflections are important as one must check the answers/cases using common sense instead of blindly following formulas/theorems.

Another aspect that I found useful about this activity is that it has alerted me what to pay attention to when designing my own web site (author information, publishing body, bias of information, accuracy of information, currency of information, design of interface, and accessibility).

Course Expectations

What I hope to gain from this class is a better understanding of how technology can be used inside secondary classrooms to help all types of learners (visual, auditory, etc.) gain understanding of the materials in the math curriculum. I hope to learn how to excite, engage, and facilitate students to learn mathematics using simple and readily available technology.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog! This blog is for reflections of my summer 2013 TPTE 486 class. I also keep a web site for this class (see my math class website and learn more about me and what our class has been up to in TPTE 486)!