Smart Boards in the Classroom

Smart Boards are very useful and effective tools for aiding in learning.  This is especially true in the math class because of all of the features that they provide.  Some of the features are it allows users to generate and organize notes, incorporate videos and images, it lets users to record sound, access information online, and do interactive games.  It is so important to be able to create and save specific notes.  In classes without a smart board every student has to copy down the notes.  Very often, students will miss vital information because they are copying down notes from the board.  Now with Smart Boards they can pay attention and the teacher can save and print out class notes for all of the students.  This is a huge step for the evolution of the way we learn in the classroom.  Students love videos because they are so effective in grabbing their attention.  If I have a Smart Board in my class I will use videos to introduce certain mathematical topics when it is relevant.  All of these features are great.  However, the best feature has to be the interactive games that can be played on these boards.  I have seen all of the positive impacts that these games can have on students.  This tool really helps develop the way we learn. 

Smart Boards not come into to learning without some limitations.  The first negative aspect of a Smart Board is multi-person involvement.  Only one person can write on the board at a time which is something I think this company needs to change.  As a math teacher, I will want my students to go up to the board and do example problems.  It takes way too long to have one student go up at a time.  Another challenge that these boards present is time it will take to figure out how to best use these boards.  Any teacher can say I will write my notes on the Smart Board, but to really take advantage of all of the benefits we need to plan for this.  This takes a lot of planning and effort.  At the end of the day, Smart Boards are well worth dealing with the negative aspects of them.  They provide so many features and knowledge at the tip of our fingers.  After watching multiple teachers use them, I do not think I could be satisfied without having one in my classroom.         

IPads and Tablets in Teaching Math

IPads and tablets are very popular in today’s culture.  I have cousins who just learned how to talk but can fully operate an iPad.  This tells me that this is an essential part of today’s generation.  It is always important for us as teachers to incorporate popular culture into our classroom because this is what our students can relate to.  In the article, “iPads in the class make teachers think differently” the author discusses how to incorporate tablets into the classroom.  IPads and tablets are great because they have so many interactive educational applications and programs on them.  In this article the author states, “Students broke into small groups, each with an iPad synchronized to the game. They jumped, called out and celebrated as they raced to tilt the tablets to manipulate a fraction on the screen into the correct place on a number line”.  After reading this article the question I asked was, “Does this really help students remember the lesson being taught or will they just remember playing a game?”  After thinking about this I am almost positive that students will learn from these games because they focus on teaching the topics.  In addition to this, most students will know how to use an iPad already which is a huge first step.  I am a huge advocate for incorporating technology because I have grown up with this technology just as my students have. 

            One of the best features about the apps made for tablets is that they are not made for one specific topic.  A tablet is like having resourceful materials about every subject and every topic.  I know they are expensive, but they do so much.  On an iPad you can play educational games, read books, browse the internet, use a scientific calculator, make and analyze graphs, and take pictures/videos.  These are just some of the things you can do on a tablet.  If I was fortunate enough to have these in my classroom then I would definitely incorporate them into my teaching. 

    

Collaboration Canvas

The original canvas was titled “An introduction to a unit plan on World War II: The Pacific”.  This original unit showed how the atomic bombs use affected the outcome of the war.  To put a math spin on it I decided to use ratios and percentages to show damage and chances of surviving an atomic bomb.  I concentrated the math part of this collaborative lesson on the atomic bomb because it seemed to be the main focus of the original canvas.  I knew how I wanted to use the math for this unit; however I wanted to make it an interesting introduction to engage the students.  All of my supporting tools, such as the video, picture gallery, and additional resources were there to connect the history aspect of WWII with the mathematics behind it.  The pictures help show the radius of the blast and the damage done per second.  The video also shows the blast radius for bombs of different sizes.  I did not remove anything from the original canvas because it all meshed well with my side of the collaborative unit.

Link to unit: http://www.play.annenberginnovationlab.org/play2.0/challenge.php?idChallenge=2584&mode=view#network6  

YouTube Videos

While I read about technology in the classroom I found a good article titled, “Technology in the Hands of a Great Teacher”.  This article is very helpful because it discusses the positive and negative aspects of bringing technology into the classroom.  Many articles only focus in on how technology benefits the classroom.  This is good however the most important part of bringing technology into the classroom is how it is integrated.  The author begins his article by stating, “I've brought a lot of different technologies into my high-school Physics classroom over the past 10 years, and the results have been nothing short of awesome.”  This quote says a lot to me.  This is a teacher who clearly has a lot of experience and he is not afraid to bring new learning tools into the classroom.  Sometimes you see experienced teachers shy away from using new learning aids into their class because they are confident and comfortable in the way they teach this lesson.

All of this information on using technology in the classroom is great, but what are the best technologies to use?  The author of this article responded to this question by saying, “No single technology has changed the way I teach (and learn) more significantly and in more ways over the past decade than YouTube.”  Learning videos can be so helpful because our society today is obsessed with watching videos and TV.  If this is how my students will stay engaged then I will definitely incorporate YouTube videos into my lesson plan.  Before any teacher can do this we need to answer a few questions about using videos.  When are they appropriate?  How do we implement them so they are helpful and not a distraction?  Is there a time during class in which they are more productive?  These are just a few questions that we need to answer in order to make using videos a positive.  I believe that using videos can be good way to show things that may normally not be possible.  A good example of this is measuring surface area of a house.  It is impossible to bring a house into a classroom, but you can show this example using a YouTube video.            

Unit Plan Canvas

Creating this canvas was a fun and great idea because it allows our students to see what they are going to be learning.  This will help engage them in their learning.  I really enjoyed making this because I was able to explore videos and images about this unit.  I would not have viewed this video otherwise.  This is something I will definitely use in my future classes because I know as a student I would have loved to have an insight into what I was learning.  In high school my classes normally just moved from unit to unit without a proper introduction.  I think my friends and I could have benefited from knowing what we were starting next.  In addition to this I like how the students can leave comments and questions on the “what do you think” tab.  If we can know what our students are thinking then we can teach them what they do not know.  This unit is all about the geometry of circles.  This unit will teach students the basic terminology and key concepts.  They will learn about area and circumference of circles.   

http://www.play.annenberginnovationlab.org/play2.0/challenge.php?idChallenge=2442&mode=view#network6

Information Visualization Tools

            Information visualization tools are very important to incorporate into our lessons.  An information visualization tool is a visual tool that allows a student to view, analyze and understand challenging information.  My area of concentration is mathematics.  Some examples of information visualization tools in math are graphs, pictures and using manipulative tools.  All of these visual aids help students think about and understand crucial and complicated topics such as sine and cosine functions and the Pythagorean Theorem. 

            Some things that we should consider before we incorporate these information visualization tools into our lessons are our learning objectives, the way our students learn, constraints you have and the context in which the tools are used.  The learning objective will state what the goal of the lesson is and if a specific information visualization tool is appropriate or not.  To use an information visualization tool appropriately you need to know who your students are and how they learn most effectively.  We need to know if our students have the ability to use the information visualization tools in the time given.  Some specific constraints that we need to consider are time and if you will have the resources.  Resources can be computer lab time to see interactive graphs or software to draw pictures.  The last thing to consider is the context in which the information visualization tool is used.  An example would be if you already were using a visual aid then would it be appropriate to use another one.  As teachers we need to figure out how we could incorporate both. 

            Once we know how to successfully incorporate these information visualization tools into our lessons we need to figure out the best way to assess our students.  Assessing the way our students use these information visualization tools is not very different than the way we normally assess them.  We need to make sure they know how to analyze and understand the information they are presented in the information visualization tools.  An example of this would be drawing a picture to represent distances from three points of a right triangle.  Then the students would have to identify why they drew the picture the way they did and how the Pythagorean Theorem is applied.   

Technology & Pedagogy

My goal was to find a lesson that was engaging and allowed the students to think critically.  I chose this lesson because it was student oriented and it integrated technology effectively, but at the same time there were parts that I believed I could add and edit to make it a more complete lesson.  I truly believe there is no such thing as a perfect lesson because there is always a small hiccup that we do not account for. 

              There were certain parts of the lesson in which the curriculum, teaching strategies and technologies used were not completely connected.  In the first step the lesson describes how the circumference of a circle depends on the diameter of it.  The lesson then gives the students a procedure to follow integrating MIRA, which is a transparent geometric tool that reflects like a mirror to help understand characteristics of a circle.  In this example the technology and curriculum goals align very nicely, but I think the teaching strategies relied too much on the students to do all the work.  I would have liked to see the lesson reflect the teacher/student combination of work.  It would have made it more complete, although it is a great lesson.  I would have liked to see this second standard covered in the lesson because they could be so easily implemented so I added a standard and example.  In the part I added I had the learning more teacher centered because of the fact that most of the other parts were student centered and I wanted to see an even mixture.

            I believe the technology used in this lesson was perfect for the information that was trying to be taught.  Without this technology the lesson would have been a complete failure because it relied on it to create the learning materials and implement them.  A compass was necessary for drawing a circle that the students needed to examine.  Then MIRA and the geometer sketchpad program helped see ratios which led to the students understanding the formula for circumference.  This was one of the common core content standards.
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