More Blogs!

Two of the blogs I began following mentioned using material or an idea from Dan Meyer so I Googled him and found his blog.  He updates his blog constantly and has so many different ideas and teaching strategies for teaching math.  His blogs are normally fairly short, but straight to the point.  He did one activity that touched so many different things, it was pretty impressive.  He had the students doing math, learning Excel, participating, and more.  He had students guess how many malted eggs were in a container, but also gave a smaller container and actually told them the amount of eggs in that container.  He then had the students come up with their own questions about the data, such as who won, who had the worst guess, etc.  The students worked in pairs on laptops and used the data given to them  Excel to find the answers to their questions.  It was a really interesting activity and I am excited to read more on his blog.  His blog has so many posts and so much information!

Story Time

I was looking around for some more blogs to follow and stumbled upon mathycathy's blog.  She teaches eight grade algebra and her students have been solving multi-step equations.  Instead of just giving the students an equation and telling them to solve for a, she had the students tell the story behind the equation.  She had the students create their own word problems after being given a certain equation.  I absolutely love this idea!  This activity gets the students really thinking outside of the box and checks for real understanding of the equation.  It also makes solving equations much more fine.  She said the students were also very excited and said it was hard to describe the energy in the room.  I will definitely be using something like this in my classroom one day.

Activator Lessons

The blog I began following uses activators to begin lessons.  He uses real life situations and quick little stories to open a lesson.  For the lesson on reflections, he began with a story about his daughter.  She was observing the reflection of her cup in the glass kitchen table and asked her father why the reflection is upside down.  He thought this was a great question and used it to open his lesson.  He began the rotation lesson with a picture of a manhole cover that had not been placed the correct way because the yellow lines were not matching up.  He was going to ask his students how a rotation would fix the problem and how many degrees it would need to be.  I really like the idea of using activators to begin a lesson because it takes something students are familiar with and relates it to something in math that they may not be familiar with yet. 

http://thegeometryteacher.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/truly-wonderful-the-mind-of-a-child-is/

http://thegeometryteacher.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/circles-from-cedar-street/ 

Horizon Report

The Horizon Report taught me a lot about emerging technologies in the classroom.  I did not realize that schools were already turning towards a “bring your own device” movement.  I do not necessarily agree with this movement because I do not think it is fair to students that may not have the money to have their own device.  Even though students do work better on their own devices, most students today learn technology very quickly and are familiar with a lot of different types of technology and devices.  I also did not even know what cloud computing was until I read the Horizon Report.  I have used Google docs and Google hangouts in some college courses before, but I had never heard these be described as cloud computing.  A flaw with this method is that all students will need devices in the classroom and preferably at home and students also need good connections at home. 

Games and gamification is not something that is completely new.  I learned from computer games even when I was younger and it was the thing I looked forward to most.  Learning analytics is a very interesting method.  Tracking a student can be very helpful to a student and the teacher.  I really enjoyed reading about the Hackathon that was part of the internet of things.  I find it amazing that high school students can program and develop apps.  Wearable technology is still being developed and has not quite had a huge impact on education ye

Welcome!

I am a math education major at Richard Stockton College. I hope to teach middle or high school math.  I am currently a senior at Stockton and plan to graduate in May 2015 and do my student teaching in Fall 2015.