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.