NETS*T-Ed Tech Standards for Teachers

One of the educational technology standards for teachers (NETS"T) states that teachers should promote, support, and model creative and innovative thinking and inventiveness. To me this is refering to the fact that future citizens of this world need to be able to solve problems in a variety of ways. The issues and problems facing students in the real world are complicated and complex to solve they will have to find creative solutions. For society to continue to grow and function we need to continue to be innovative and creative about technology, resources, and applications of knowledge. I read an interesting article today about a tech innovator who is using the money he earned from several start up tech companies to fund a project to help bolster the community and economy of Las Vegas. He is gathering together people from many different disciplines and career fields to help find ways to help the local community thrive and become more interconnected. Many think the project will fail since it is so creative and innovative, but I feel that we learn from our mistakes and that we should not be afraid of trying something new. I feel that this world needs more people willing to think outside the box. I feel one creative or innovative contribution to the world leads to others. A retired math teacher who works for the Center for Education in Mathematics and Computing at University of Waterloo came to speak to my students this week. At the end of his presentation he told them why math was important to learn and study. He said that math helps you learn how to solve problems and during his talk he emphasized how you can solve problems creatively. He said if you can train your brain to solve problems the best and easiest way then you can solve any problem you will face later in life. I thought it was a good message and hope my students who are not as interested in math got the message. Who really knows what is possible and what problems we will face?

I just recently modeled this idea in my classroom. I teach AP calculus and need to prepare my students for the exam in May. I usually finish the content in March. I have a month or sometimes more to review before the exam. However I wanted to approach the review in a creative way. I did not simply want to just throw questions at the students and have them solve them. I mean to make the review more engaging I could set up some trivia game. I wanted to take the idea further. I ended up deciding that I would give the students lots of old free response questions from previous exams. The students would then choose which problem that they wanted to present and explain to the class. I grade them on not only the content of the presentation, but their presentation skills. This way they are reviewing content as well as building important skills they will need later in their studies or careers. I require the students to talk for ten to fifteen minutes. I put this time limit there to make sure students explain every step. However last year some students got really creative about what they included. Some students talked about common mistakes or points lost on similar problems, some solved the problem using several methods, and some even added additional parts to the question. Some of the more outgoing students got creative about describing the situation described in the problem or they got creative in how they included the class. This year I provided many examples to the students about how to get creative about their presentation. I think since I had some examples of what previous students did and how they took different approaches to the presentation that the students began to go beyond those examples. I had one student ask if they could present the wrong answer to the class at first to spark a discussion. I worry that students might get more confused, but I am looking forward to that. Last year when I did this no one used a power point. I encouraged them to use visuals and said they could use medium they wanted. This year a student really wanted to make a powerpoint for her presentation. She wanted to make 3D visuals of the volumes and solids described in her problem. I talked with her outside of class about what programs to use and how to set up the 3D models. However she did a lot of work on her own and it turned out great. I know how hard it is tackling a new program and software. I also know how hard it is to work get mathematical symbols to display correctly in programs. I know she put in a lot of hard work into the presentation and I felt like it really added to the presentation. She still needs to work on incorporating the visuals into her presentation and work on the timing of when the slides change. However the fact that she did something that very few had done was great to see. This student isn't always the strongest on exams or "more traditional" assignments, so it was fantastic to see her excel on this assignment.

Ed703: Ed Tech Leadership Hour Log