Week 15 Reflections

After thinking about how I could have changed my statistics lesson, the only thing that I would have changed is possibly the card activity. I feel like I should have had all of the cards have the same pattern so that all students would have had the same opportunity to memorize all of the letters. This way there would have not been a control on the activity because after thinking about it I think that the card activity was an experiment because of the two different patterns. Other than that I feel like my lesson went pretty well. I think that my classmates like the guided discovery approach to my lesson rather than direct instruction. I think that is one thing that I have learned through this class and MATHS 393 that guided discovery is a very important teaching method. So many times direct instruction is only used and this puts all students at a disadvantage because they are never discovering anything independently. I think direct instruction still needs to be used in many circumstances, but I think using guided discovery is very important in every mathematics classroom.

The difference between teaching my module and my statistics lesson is that I felt like I was just giving the class worksheets to complete for my module, but I felt like I was in charge when I was teaching my statistics lesson. I think I feel this way because for my module I was working with two other people, but for my statistics lesson I was solely in charge of presenting my lesson to the class. I think when presenting in the TinkerPlots group, I did not feel like I needed to take charge because I did not want to seem like a dominant personality out of Andrew, Steve, and I. Knowing that I was in charge of my statistics lesson, it felt much more natural to take charge of the class.

Week 14 Stats Lessons

The two statistic lessons that I am going to reflect on are Ashley and Andrew's. I thought Ashley did a really good job explaining her topic even though there was not much material for her to cover. I thought she did a really good job using the random numbers chart, and I thought that she seemed very well prepared when she was speaking and discussing information pertaining to her topic. I felt like she was very natural when it came to her presenting the material, and it showed me that she will be a really good teacher in the near future.

I also thought Andrew did a really nice job with his presentation. I thought he did a really good job at the beginning explaining confidence intervals, and I really enjoyed the fact that he got the class involved with the topic he presented. His use of the TI-Inspires to help us all have a better understanding of confidence intervals was very useful, and I think it gave us a better idea on what we were learning about. He then showed us an applet that was useful, along with showing us on the board and on the chart that he gave us how to find the confidence intervals in different situations. Overall, I was very impressed with his presentation.

Week 10 Grade

This week I deserve a 5/5 on the module work/review activity because I helped my group organize our activities into modules depending on what mathematical topic each activity was discussing. As a group, I think we are feeling more and more confident that our modules are getting to the point where they could be effective for a teacher to use in a middle school/high school classroom. I have also been working on the Geogebra module in order to help Elizabeth and Ashley improve the activities that they have created or found. I plan on giving them the hard copies of the corrections and observations that I have made of their activities on Tuesday.

Week 8 Reflection: Fathom

After working on many activities using Fathom, I really believe that this program can be an effective tool in a middle or high school classroom. The first thing that I really like about Fathom is how simple it is to display data accurately on a graph. I really like how easy it is to change the graph from a dot plot to a histogram by just going to the mini-toolbar in the top right hand corner of the graph and changing it. I also like how I can use summary tables to display more than attributes of data at a time. In the third task, it was really valuable to be able to show gender, place, and age at the same time, and to compare. The third thing I like about Fathom is that it displays central measures of the data such as median and mean very nicely, and it is very easy to evaluate the information that they are displaying. Along with this, it is really nice to be able to use different formulas in order to show mean, standard deviation, maximums, minimums, etc. Fathom has a lot of cool features that I am continually learning about, and I have really enjoyed spending time getting to understand this program.

Week 7 Reflection: Geogebra

Before this week, I had only used Geogebra in MATHS 202 to do a few small activities. After this week, I can see how this program would be very beneficial for middle and high school students. I really liked using this program because it allows students to see how beneficial it is to see certain shapes and polygons, but Geogebra is special because it also allows students to understand certain algebraic qualities that these geometric figures have by displaying the slopes and equations that these figures have. I really thought that Elizabeth and Ashley did an excellent job writing a module that allowed us to slowly get used to the program by doing simple operations before we dove into more difficult operations. I also thought it was really cool how Geogebra used sliders to show certain qualities of functions because it would allow students to have a much deeper understanding of how certain variables of equations of functions can change the graphs of a function depending on its numeric value. The only thing that I observed that would make this program a little bit more difficult to use especially at the middle school level is that the instructions for this module tended to be somewhat lengthy which may give middle school teachers a headache when trying to keep students focused on these activities. As far as high school students, I think that they would pick up what is going on very quickly. Overall, I was very impressed with the detail and organization of this module, as well as the program that was being used.

Week 6 Tasks

I write about Week 6 (four days late SORRY!!!) with mixed feelings. I will start with what I thought was positive about my week. I really enjoyed the reading because it reminded me how important the use of graphing calculators are in the classroom. Both activities presented in the article I thought could be used in my future classroom, so I enjoyed learning about the reading. The next thing that I enjoyed was getting to choose two activities (Amazing Profit and Linear Alignment) on Illumination that I thought I would use in my future classroom. I decided to choose two activities dealing with slope since I am going to teach middle school and will more than likely dealing with a lot of algebra related topics. The two activities that I found were very informative, yet very simple and to the point, and I liked that because it would allow me to incorporate these two activities into my future lesson plans because it would only take one to two days to use each one of these activities.

The thing that frustrated me the most with my week was my attempt to find activities that I will use on the module I will be making for Week 7. This is not to say that I think that there are not any activities that I can find or make to make a good module. But the two activities that I found and completed (Scoring Points and Free Throws) were in the TinkerPlots workbook that I borrowed, and honestly they were horribly constructed. There were questions that were so vague and had certain answers that really would not benefit the student learning them that I would finish the lessons and just have no idea how these activities were supposed to benefit a student at all. What I have learned this semester is the importance of detail when using technology in mathematics, but these activities left me with the impression that that was the complete opposite goal that they had. My goal for Week 7 is to make my own activities or to find some more equipped activities that will allow me to make a module that is worth learning about. This week has shown me that there are some TinkerPlot activities that were made when the program was first discovered that did not get tested very well. I am hoping that through the module I plan to make that I can make more detailed activities than the ones that I just completed.

Week 6: Reaction to Online Classrooms

When I learned that we were going to be hearing from a math teacher that teaches online only, I was surprised because I did not think about those options being available or even existing. I just assumed the kids primarily go to a public or private high school or they are home schooled. I did not think about kids that are home schooled actually having instructors that teach them online. I will admit that I find it strange that someone would want to teach online because to me that just means that you are more interested in the material than the kids that are being taught. As much as I love math, I am going into teaching because I want to have a positive influence on young teenagers lives. I absolutely love the energy and enthusiasm that they have for life, and I am excited about the prospect of waking up every day and being excited to go do my job. When he said that he had some negative experiences in the classroom, I was not surprised because I expect to encounter things in the classroom that I am not going to be pleased with, but it is how one responds to those situations that shows what type of teacher they really are.

In Mike's situation, I am happy that he found a job doing something that he really enjoys, which is teaching math. It was easy to see that he really enjoys teaching online, and teaching higher level math to students that want to be challenged. It seemed to me though that he may have had a tougher time enjoying teaching in public schools because he had to deal with both the kids that wanted to learn and the kids that did not want to learn (as much.) One of the challenges that I look forward to when I become a teacher is to find ways to help students that have more trouble with math so that they can go through there life not feeling limited when it comes to having mathematical knowledge. I know that this will not be easy, but I look forward to the challenges that I will have with these students. I believe that early on in teaching, I will run into some bumps in the road, and I will have to learn how to adjust to those bumps, but I think that once I have some experience under my belt I will have some really good ideas on how the majority of middle grade students like to learn math. I do not think there will be one way in particular, but I think I will know different ways to benefit each student's mathematical abilities.

The speculations that I have made about Mike may not be true. This is just my opinion based on listening to him talk last Thursday. I think it is awesome that there are people that are talented enough to teach students online because I do not think I would be as effective as a teacher that way, but he seems to be really good at it. Overall, I thought it was good to hear from someone who was in a different situation in teaching math, and hearing how their experiences have been in their situation with teaching mathematics.