About Me

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I love to teach and I love math. Teaching has always been a passion since I was in 5th grade. I gained a love of math later in eighth grade. I have been told that I always have a smile on my face and a song in my heart which is the best description of me.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Oregon Techonology Education Network Conference Reflections

Here is a video describing the presentations I attended at the Oregon Technology Education Network Conference(OTEN). I want to share this with other educators, students, Computer scientists, students, and parents just to get people thinking of different directions that education can go.





Resources:
Session 1: Social Networking and Digital Citizenship in the Elementary Classroom
Session 2:World of Warcraft: Social constructivism in a virtual world and applications to the real world classroom.
Coming soon.....
So I know I talked about my senior thesis a little in the talk. I will go and make a video using screener to quickly go over it so you guys can get an idea about how I used math to analyze the game candy land. I will put it in the resources for the second section since it relates to games in math. So you can look forward to that.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Every student must be Technologically literate

I think one of the major goals of these standards is to prepare students to use technology to solve problems and understand that you must become creative about what they do. As the use of technology increases in society students must learn to adapt and find meaningful ways to use the technology that is readily at their fingertips. They need to be prepared to use technology because they will need those skills later in life since as I said before technology is becoming more prevalent in society. I also believe allowing students to use various programs to create a final project allows them to choose a format that fits their learning style. So I say let them be creative with technology.

The other big part to introducing technology in the classroom is that you have to teach students about privacy and responsible use. I think this has often fallen on parents or been forgotten. We need to help students realize that their are consequences. I also believe that technology is only as smart as the person using it. A student must know what are the best sites to use for information and where to look for information. There is a lot of information out there and there are a lot of programs out there to sift through. We as educators must guide students through the wonders and pitfalls of the technological world.

Another major concept behind these standards is to have students be able to organize information into their Google presentations or yodio podcasts. Students need to learn how to organize and present the information in a way that makes sense.They need to understand how to use the programs tools and features for organizing information. Then they must also learn to really only include what is important to the presentation.

The last big idea that I pulled from the standards was the skills students need to learn about how to use technology to bring people together. Technology and web computing has power to reach a large audience. You need to have students explore different types of media to get the information across. This way students with different learning styles that are listening to the presentation can relate to one of the media types. Students must also learn how to use technology within a group. One simple way we have seen so far in our classes after we discovered the amazingness of google docs. By using google docs students can easily share their thoughts on the subject in one document. I was excited to see that students got their own account to google apps. I am unsure if they have been taught about the other resources, but I think it could go hand in hand. They have just started showing students google apps so it will be interesting to see if the freshmen of this year will graduate knowing how to make information come to them. Each student has access to the schools google calendar and can get text message alerts about important events. They are also encouraged to use their calendar to mark down homework as well.

As we have seen in the program it is most important to model all of these techniques in the classroom. Therefore your curriculum most include various types of media to present the information. You must also use various forms of media to inform parents, administrators, and students about what is going on in your classroom. My student teaching site has a website called moodle where students can get notes, print off assignments, download songs, and even instant message their teacher. If parents and students are taught how to take the most advantage of this site it makes the teachers life much easier and teaches the student personally responsibility. The information is there and you just need to access it.

I think the biggest technology that I want to bring into my math classroom in high school is a program called LaTeX. I used it all through out college to type up my math homework. I believe students need to be exposed to this technology so that their homework can look cleaner and they can see what is used in the professional math communities. Almost all math textbooks are written using this program, so if they are reading textbooks using the program why not incorporate in the classroom. I may ask students to type up certain homeworks or projects using LaTeX. I may also as a beginning assignement let them explore what the program can do. This beginning assignment would address many of the Creativity and Innovation standards in the Oregon Educational Technology Standards (OETS). I know from experience that you may not know exactly how write the code to represent an organize the information, so you have to work at it and research different ways. You may also exactly know the code for the information, but it isn't working correctly. This program forces you to trouble shoot and analyze problems in your code. This covers the Technology and Operations standard in the OETS. I also believe that by teaching students how to use this technology to share their mathematical ideas that they are learning another form of mathematical communication that is used through out the mathematical community. This allows them to share information with peers, teachers, and others across the world. Therefore I plan on having students share or publish these documents so that I include the Communication and Collaboration standard from the OETS within my curriculum.

Another technological component in my classroom that I am currently thinking about including is a problem of the week blog. I would post an interesting question or topic that relates to the math we are studying and have students blog about ideas. They would not have to find a solution, but talk about how it is interesting and ways to find a solution. Each student would have their own blog so that they can get their own ideas out first. Then by using Google reader or by following students on blogger they would comment on two other students blogs. Having students comment and collaborate about solutions will again bring in the Communication and Collaboration standard form the OETS into the classroom. As we have all come to learn there are a few trouble shooting issues to deal with when blogging and when working with technology there will always have to be some trouble shooting. Therefore helping students learn to solve their own problems about their blogs will allow me to address the Technology and Operations from the OETS. This is challenging students to use problem solving skills and analyze a problem. Then by having them read other students blogs they are exposed to multiple perspectives. Therefore having a project like this uses technology to address the Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Decision making standard in the OETS. If I use this project in my classroom then I would have to teach students about digital citizenship. I can talk to them about what is appropriate personal information to put on the internet and about privacy settings. In this day and age everyone has to learn digital responsibility because there are consequences for what you do online. Having these discussions with students is not only important, but covered in the digital citizenship standard of the OETS.

Those are two specific examples of how I will use technology in my classroom and how that incorporation meets the standards.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Working with Student Scores in a Spread Sheet

By finding the average on each test you can see that the class average continued to improve. When ordering the scores from lowest student average to the highest you can see trends within the student's test score. The student may have a low average, but you can see what test really threw them off. You can also tell which subject area they did the best on. You can see a trend within a student's test scores and compare it to their average easily. Then if the raw data was not good enough you can create a graph. I chose to do a bar graph to compare easily the scores from each test of each student.





Here is the link to the original data.