Week 3 Reflection

This Week 3 reflection is coming a little late due to getting behind on some of my work from Weeks 2 and 3, but I am caught up after spending around 20 hours on this class this week. This week has helped increase my level of comfort with TinkerPlots due to the articles that I read and reflected on, and the activity/lesson that I made using an instructional video of off keypress.com. The two articles that I read helped me understand that TinkerPlots is a program that can be very useful in the middle school classroom. I believe this to be true because it is a program that can give them structure mathematically with data analysis, probability, and statistics, but it also allows them to explore how to evaluate and discover data patterns and trends on their own without structure.
Middle school students today are more technologically advanced at that age than any other generation in history, and I think they would be able to gain a lot from TinkerPlots if the time was made to use it.The reason that I believe this is due to the fact that since there are a variety of different data sets with different topics, they could find one that they relate to, and they could use that data in order to benefit them mathematically. Also, since Tinkerplots is very colorful I think that they would be intrigued with how it looks, and would enjoy doing math more than if they were looking at a textbook and making a bar graph on graph paper. One of the most beneficial things about TinkerPlots in my opinion is that it is simple, and is made so that all middle school aged would be able to gain something from it. Sometimes mathematical technology computer programs can be to overwhelming for students with limited mathematical knowledge, but that is not the case with TinkerPlots, which makes in my mind will make it enjoyable to use for students and educators.
When it comes to my own knowledge of TinkerPlots I feel pretty comfortable with constructing material after making my own lesson this week. Given I did use the TinkerPlots instructional website videos to help construct my lesson, I feel that if I had made a lesson on a simpler topic that I would be more than capable to. The first lesson that I made though was a little more difficult so I used a video to make sure that the questions I was asking were at a middle school level. It is really cool that in only a month, I have gained sufficient knowledge on my technology, and I can not imagine how comfortable I will be by the end of the semester!