Friday 7/31 - Rethinking Math Education

As I mentioned yesterday, I was going to try to put up a short video of my kaleidoscope that I created in Geometer's Sketchpad. The video was made by copying still shots of the kaleidoscope transitions and pasting each image into Paint. I then uploaded those images into Microsoft Photostory3 to create a simple video.

All this week we have learned multiple technological tools that can aid in teaching mathematics. This has really made me rethink my own experiences in learning math and how relevant a lot of it was to real life. Yesterday, as a class, we discussed some important concepts that all students should learn from math and yet these are the concepts we least focus on. Students should be able to analyze, understand number sense, do graphical interpretation, proportional reasoning, and modeling. With technology, I think that teachers will have to rethink the traditional ways of teaching math and focus more on those concepts that are relevant to students after they are done with math classes. I believe, as with all subjects in school, students should be learning a set of skills that will enable them to make wise decisions in their life and every subject should be helping build these skills through different methods of learning.

I have learned some technology before this class, but learning the few tools this week and having a whole week to play with them has made me a lot more comfortable with the technological tools that are out there. I am more likely now to use these tools to help me teach math in the future.

As my final project for this course, I have created a survey that math students could take and then I can download the information in Fathom to look at trends. My survey can be taken at

http://survey.keypress.com/web/loginForm.php

Please sign in as a student to take the Car Survey.

Username: car

Password: car

Thursday 7/30 - Creative Math

Daily Class Exit BlogAnswer at least one of the following:1. Describe something you learned2. Questions you have or something you would like to learn more about3. Describe connections to classroom practice

So often people see math as very cut and dry - seeing numbers all the time. I liked the activities we did today because it showed math in a different light. The kaleidoscope activity in Sketchpad was so much fun and pretty. The math concepts that I had to understand in creating the kaleidoscope were polygons and reflection. Simple math concepts but when repeated over and over again created a very unique and colorful pattern.

I think the connection to classroom practice today is giving students another outlet for applying mathematical concepts. Creating a kaleidoscope or making a math autobiography video allows students to apply concepts in different learning styles. I can see more artistic students enjoying this type of learning so much more. I'm still working on turning my kaleidoscope into a video and maybe have it in tomorrow's post. Yay!

Wednesday 7/29 - Excel

Daily Class Exit BlogAnswer at least one of the following:1. Describe something you learned2. Questions you have or something you would like to learn more about3. Describe connections to classroom practice

Today, we did more data analysis in Fathom and the more we use it the more I like it. It is just so simple to use. I love the click and drag method and how I can generate multiple graphs in very little time. The other thing I like about Fathom is the ability to just go grab data from the Data and Story Library (DASL) and import it directly into the program. From there, I look at so many different representations of the data and have so much more time for analysis.

I really enjoyed the Excel activity with the number shifters. I am familiar with Excel and I think that an activity like this would not be too hard to recreate. Personally, I had fun with the activity...it felt like a game to me. I would hope that my students would feel the same way. Math gets such a bad rap for being tedious and boring and teachers really need to help to change that image.

I do have a question for today. We have looked at a lot activities in Geometer's Sketchpad, Fathom, and Excel in the past few days that have been created by others. Some activities, I feel I might be able to replicate, but others like the Talent Show activity or the Angle and Velocity activity today seemed a bit more complex. Are these activities easy to find online somewhere where teachers can just grab them to use in their lessons? The same question goes for Geometer's Sketchpad and Fathom.

Tuesday 7/28 - Data Analysis

Answer at least one of the following:1. Describe something you learned2. Questions you have or something you would like to learn more about3. Describe connections to classroom practice

I absolutely loved what we did today! We started off doing more Geometer's Sketchpad and playing with some manipulatives involving algebra scales and function dynagraphs and then moved onto using Fathom to look at data. What I liked so much today was that we did very little or no computations at all. Instead, we were looking at functions and equations in graphical ways and analyzing what the data meant.

Thinking about how this changes the way we learn or teach math, I can see a movement away from number crunching and computation to making meaning of data that we use in equations and tables. I can see technology as a way to engage students in more meaningful experiences with mathematics. Using real-life data in Fathom and looking at trends or patterns can help kids use math vocabulary such as slope, but instead of slope being just a number, it's shape can be interpreted to mean something. Fathom is such a simple statistical tool to use to teach statistics. I was engaged through all the activities today and did not feel like I was doing a lot of math. I would hope that incorporating technology into my math lessons will make my students feel the same way.

Monday 7/27 - Geometer's Sketchpad

Answer at least one of the following:1. Describe something you learned2. Questions you have or something you would like to learn more about3. Describe connections to classroom practice

Today I learned an amazing new tool to use in the classroom called Geometer's Sketchpad. This tool is great to get students to interactively work with different shapes and polygons and observe different properties of these shapes/polygons. In class today, I did an exercise called Quadilateral Exploration on Sketchpad where I looked at the different properties of quadilaterals, rectangles, trapezoids, parallelograms, rhombuses, kites, and squares and how they were similar and different from each other. The exercise forced me to think about what made each quadilateral unique by allowing me to manipulate the different shapes and observe how they changed. For example, a quadilateral is any 4-sided polygon. Therefore, trapezoids, parallelograms, rhombuses, kites, rectangles, and squares are ALL quadilaterals.

As I went through the exercise, I started to see the quadilateral "tree". Trapezoids and kites are subsets of quadilaterals. Parallelograms are a subset of trapezoids. Rhombuses are a subset of both parallelograms and kites. Rectangles are also a subset of parallelograms. Finally, a square is a subset of rhombuses and rectangles.

Sketchpad allows users to construct shapes which is trickier than it sounds. I had to be mindful on how I would know that I constructed a right angle or two parallel lines. It was such a great exercise to stretch one's understanding of geometry. I will definitely be using some of the activities I learned today in my own classroom in the future.