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.