Capstone Paper - Things 1-7

Things 1-7 Capstone Reflection

As I work my way through the 21 Things, it becomes apparent that I can’t help but use the applications in the classroom to improve the learning experiences for my students.

A great deal of the technology presented thus far will make its way to the students via Blackboard.  I have posted several links to my Blackboard page and will post more in the near future. In class, I will visit the sites and show the students how the sites work and what they can learn/reinforce using the sites. I will also let the parents know that these resources are available and of educational value for their students.

I will continue to use the Blackboard site to provide resources to the students, such as homework assignments, worksheets, solutions and key concepts sheets. I have debated whether I post my classroom sessions (currently on PowerPoint) or even additionally, should I record the audio and some classroom video and post the classes themselves online.

I also see that some of the resources and techniques presented will be used in teaching the lessons.  I use an interactive Brightlink projector that I use every day and I have sound capability that I rarely use. I will use the text-to-speech application this week – I believe it will enable me to differentiate major concepts and increase the engagement of the students.

Improvement in my own practices will come from using the above sources and also from continuing to expand the resources available.  This course is providing the direction to continue to look at a number of educational resource sites for additional applications and to further explore the web for items that can be used in the classroom.

In providing additional resources online for students to turn to, I can offer students opportunities to achieve a better and deeper understanding of concepts. For my Informal Geometry students, the three digital manipulatives on transformations will greatly help those students who do not visualize spatial orientations. These students generally do not “see” how the figures interact and where they should end up. For my Geometry students (including the Informal ones), the “That Quiz” application provides not only a current resource to enhance current learning, but also a resource to review prior learning to reinforce those topics.

I envision using those review sites towards the end of the school year for my geometry students as they head into Algebra 2/Trig. They often arrive in an Algebra 2 classroom having totally forgotten many of their Algebra 1 concepts (like graphing lines, factoring numbers, and exponents). Perhaps our math department should put together a list of recommended activities for students to prepare for the next school year over the summer.

I can see that some of the applications will enable group projects to be more collaborative as students will not have to be in one place to get things done via Google Docs.

I am certainly addressing the value of homework and practice with the use of Blackboard for organizing the homework and providing additional resources for students to revisit the material. Having links to sites that provide the material and extra practice should help those students who like to learn independently or via the web and to those students who need multiple exposures to the material before they gain a working knowledge of it.

The web resources will help in student visualization (Marzano’s Using Non-Linguistic Representations), which is an extremely important skill in Geometry. It helps the students understand how everything fits together if they can visualize it well. Importing these visualizations into my lessons can only help further the students’ understanding – which can be additionally reinforced by the online activities they can do at home as discussed above.

I will be assigning a project, due at the end of the semester, for students to make a music video of a math concept (a formula, a postulate or a theorem). The video will need to be between two and five minutes long and can be any music form (rap being the easiest of the genres). The collaboration and cooperative work in putting the video together will need to be documented via Google Apps – a script, picture of the group, listing of meeting times and places (all of our students have accounts) along with filling out a form delineating their efforts, the group participants, the math behind their video. A short slide presentation of the math concept will be required.

I will then have our school’s video news include the top several videos in a series of their broadcasts.

This project will meet several of the 2009 METS standards for Grades 9-12 students:

9-12.CC.2 – use available technologies to communicate with others on a class assignment or project. The students have access to Google Apps and will be required to use it in several aspects of the project – filling out a planning form and a completion form, submitting their script and putting together a presentation of the math principle involved.

9-12.CC.3 – collaborate in content-related projects that integrate a variety of media – audio, video and print (perhaps graphic) media will be involved. Most of our students have access to enough technology to get this done – a percentage have posted YouTube videos (and we will discuss what is appropriate to post and what type of information stays with you for a lifetime…)

9-12.CC-4 – plan and implement a collaborative project using telecommunications tools – this could come into play, and I will talk about and show them one or two ways to do this (certainly Skype is conducive to this sort of activity).

It is interesting and challenging to take advantage of the technological tools that we have for our use – and to consider adding additional tools. (I really like the Adobe Connect meeting tools and am considering adding that to my classroom.)