Final Week!

For our final week we created a video to summarize and reflect on our learning throughout this course. I teamed up with Cecile to do a short interview style video highlighting what we will take away most from the course, and where we sit on the continuum of technology in the classroom.

Enjoy!
 

TT #10

Classroom Blogs!

For this tech task I explored Ms. Cassidy’s Classroom Blog. It is easy to follow and really well formatted. I enjoy how the links to the students’ blogs are called their “learning”.  I went through and found some math postings from Sage’s Learning, looks like they’re having fun creating videos. 

 

I really like this idea of having a class blog, especially in math. Students can take a picture of the problem they are working on, and get help from other students, all outside of the class. Pretty cool.

TT #12

The Future!

 

 

I think the future of education is bright! Change is underway; I like the trends towards inquiry based learning, essential questions, 1:1 initiatives, and opened ended assessment. This drive towards a deeper understanding of the concepts and a more hands on approach has become evident in my past two years studying education. The K-12 Horizon Report touched on a lot of things that have been brought to the forefront in this class. Things that stood out to me in the report were: 

• The shift to deep learning approaches - “There is a new emphasis in the classroom on more challenge based, active learning”

• Integrating Personalized Learning

• BYOD & Cloud Computing

• Wearable Technology – “tracks sleep, movement, location, social media, etc.”

-   How weird would it be to have all students walking around the halls with Google’s glasses on!

 

TT #11

Show and Tell!

Desmos is a cool graphing calculator app I was introduced to at a PD last year. It is tons of fun to play around in and very easy to use - no head ache inducing tutorial necessary. You could use it at all levels of graphing. Simply playing around and creating a picture using as many equations you can think of is a fun spin on the usual graphing tasks, and a review!

https://www.desmos.com/calculator 

TT #9

Using Online Video in the Classroom

I think using video in the classroom is a great teaching tool. I think information should be presented in as many different ways as possible in order to reach as many students as possible and video is a great way to add some visual to a lesson.  Also, students still seem to associate video with taking a break from the lecture, when really they can still be learning while watching. Here is a video I found that I would show Pre-Calc and Calc students to address the “what use is this” and “when will we ever use this?” questions in a different way from “well you’ll need it in university if you want to be an engineer..” etc. I think math can be fun and beautiful in it’s own way, and this video shines a little bit of light on this aspect of the subject.

After Bryce’s presentation and examples of work his student’s had created, I am excited to have students make videos to show their learning. I think it opens up so much room for creativity, especially in a math classroom where it is usually test after test. I am on the fence for having the students post their videos on YouTube. I would defiantly like them to post them on a class site or blog so classmates can use them as resources. It would be cool if they shared them outside the classroom too, I could see a student gaining a lot of confidence from another student around the world learning and benefiting from their work. I also see the dangers of this however. It would be ideal if there were a world wide sharing platform for educational purposes.