GeoGebra

GeoGebra is a website that allows students to create their own shapes and graphs. I will use it in the classroom to help students discover how a graph is changed just by tweaking the equation. GeoGebra can be downloaded as an app on Apple and Windows devices and can be accessed anywhere for free. As a teacher, I can also access worksheets and different material from fellow teachers.

In class, my students will work with GeoGebra on a regular basis. It is a great way for my students to discover mathematical concepts on their own instead of just from my lecture. GeoGebra provides students with multiple tools to explore and gives a sense of independence. Like me, I imagine my students would rather do their own exploring and make their own conclusions.

I will also use GeoGebra on my SMARTboard so that all students can see the same thing. GeoGebra is a great way for me to model exactly what a graph should like without me having to draw it (because my graph drawing is not the best).

#MathPhotoADay

The #mathphotoaday project was started by a third grade teacher named Mrs. Bettes in Manitoba. She started out having her third graders take pictures of a math concept every day for the whole month of May. Each day, she would give them a prompt, such as to take a picture of a polygon. Then these were shared on Twitter. The students learned quite a bit from the project and it allowed them to be creative. It was also a great way to get the students to start seeing math concepts in their real life surroundings.

In this high school classroom, I will make the prompts a little more challenging. I will have students take pictures of different situations where using the Pythagorean Theorem would apply, for example. I will have students upload these to the classroom blog so that all of the students can see them and I can review them. I think it will be fun to see what students come up with, and I think students will enjoy looking for ways to use math in real life. It can be a fun way to end the school year by reviewing major concepts we covered.

 I read about this project in two different articles by Richard Byrne in Free Technology for Teachers. These are titled Making Observations With "Photo a Day" Projects and Photograph Math - #mathphotoaday . Check these out and I hope you enjoy.

Flipped Classrooms

The idea of flipped classrooms is relatively new to the education world and has been made possible by the many technologies we have today. A flipped classroom is exactly that, "flipped." Where a traditional classroom teacher lectures or has some other passive instructional content during class time and sends homework (the assessment) home with students, flipped classrooms take a more active role. Flipped classrooms focus on the more active assessments in class and the passive instruction at home. Two advantages of flipping a classroom are that there is more time for formative assessments and there is more time for individualized and differentiated instruction. Because students are watching the lecture or reading over material at home, the time in class can be spent on applying the material the students have learned. This leaves more opportunities for teachers to have one on one learning experiences with students.

I can see many ways I could use the flipped classroom design in a high school math classroom. I could have students watch my lecture videos at home or even have them read a section in their math book on the topic before coming to class the following day. Then, in class, we can work in stations. Students could get into groups and discuss what it is they learned from the video or reading assignment. After that, we would dive right into the assessment part of things by working in groups to solve a few problems and maybe do a few on the board. If some students are still having trouble, this would be a good time for me to work separately with them while others were working together on example equations or projects.

 

 I learned more information about flipped classrooms through the article called Two Key Advantages of a Flipped Classroom in the online journal Educational Technology and Mobile Learning.

Stoodle: Online Interactive Whiteboards

Stoodle is an online website that is free to use. It is an online whiteboard where anyone can draw, type, insert pictures and graphs, etc. Basically, it is everything you can do on a regular whiteboard and more that is online and interactive. This means that teachers and students can use it at the same time, no matter where they are. In order for the students to access the whiteboard, the teacher creates a "classroom" and provides the URL of that "classroom" to the students. There is also a chat option where the students and/or teacher can communicate back and forth. Stoodle also allows importing of files from many sources such as Google Drive and Dropbox and can also be used on iPads.

This site would be very beneficial to my math classroom. I could use it in a variety of ways from flipped classrooms to tutoring sessions. Flipped classrooms are where students get the lectures, notes, and materials outside of the classroom setting and the classroom is used for application of the learning. I can see how Stoodle could be used to create lecture videos for students to view or they could also be a part of the lesson in real time at home or wherever they have access to internet. Stoodle could also be a great way for peer tutoring, especially since it can be accessed on an iPad. With the iPad, Stoodle allows for free drawing which would help in tutoring sessions. I also think Stoodle could be used as a way for students to work on projects together and collaborate. One of the projects I would like to implement in my classroom is having students work in groups to create a tutorial that they can share on the classroom blog. Stoodle could be just the thing to help them accomplish that.


 I found out information about Stoodle from How to Create Online Collaborative Whiteboards by Richard Byrne. I have also included a video below, also found on that website, that was helpful to me in understanding how Stoodle works.