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)!