MACUL 2014

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the MACUL conference this year in Grand Rapids Michigan. We arrived Friday morning and I was able to attended three sessions. I had chosen three sessions to attend before I arrived and I was excited to get started. When we arrived I was shocked at how many people were there and how large the venue was. I started looking for my first session about 20 minuets before it was supposed to begin and I did not arrive to the location (after getting lost a few times) until 5 minuets after it began! By the time I arrived at the project based learning presentation it was full, so I wondered into a different session on organizing my gmail accounts. Even though this session was not directly about teaching I found it very helpful and when I find some time organizing my e-mail will be first on my list!! In this session the presenter explained how to use labels, filters, and stars to organize your e-mail. If you would like more information here is the link to what he presented at MACUL 2014 click here or leave a comment below and I will do my best to answer your questions.

The next session I attended was on flipping your math classroom. I was excited to attend my first math oriented session. To make sure that we did not miss this one we rushed over right after our first session finished, it was a good thing that we did because that session filled up quickly as well. While this session did not introduce many new aspects of flipping your classroom they did offer some good resources for flipping your classroom and a lot of good websites for finding videos about math (I am currently not with my notes that I took on that day but I will post some of those resources when I get home). Another idea that this session introduced me to that I was excited about was that you could flip one day or one unit you do not have to go all out flipping right away. I am not sure why this thought had never come to me before but it made flipping seem much more manageable and something that you could try and if it does not work well for that unit then not have to commit to it for the entire year. In looking back this session was probably the most helpful in thinking about teaching math.

The next session I went to was the one that I was most excited to go to, it was about differentiation in a math classroom. The presenters' classroom was very different than the classroom that I am working in and so the information presented was not as useful as I had hoped. The presenter had students at different grade levels and at different places in the curriculum in the classroom and her presentation was about how she helps all of these students learn what they need for where they are. I appreciate the work she is doing but what I am struggling with differentiation is how to best help all of my students in my classroom reach the same goals. When all of the students in the classroom have different goals I believe this is a different type of differentiation.

Overall I enjoyed my experience at MACUL! I was surprised by the size and how many educators were there!! I learned some valuable information but I think next time I would like to do some better research on the presenters to find the one that will best match my current teaching situation.

Edubloggers, What to Say and How to Say it!

So I have put this off as long as possible because for some reason I find edubloggers very daunting and commenting on one of their post frightens me. I even went back and looked at our assignment to see if there was a way around commenting on an edubloggers post but unfortunately there is not! I am not sure exactly why this part of the assignment has me so nervous, I have had two edubloggers' pages open in my browser for over a week now and only because I have to turn in a link to prove that I did comment on their blogs.

I actually haven't done it yet, but I will! I have also spent waaaay to much time finding the perfect blog post to make a comment on!! I don't know what to say, I feel like I do not have anything to add to the conversation. All of the posts that I like have a lot of comments on them already and through reading them all I do not feel like I have something to add. The other posts the are less intriguing have few posts which I also find intimidating. It is nerve racking to post something to the internet with my name on it. Also what is the blogger etiquette? If a post is older than a month can I still comment on it?

While I have spent too much time looking at edubloggers I came across this page and maybe you all did too for new teachers and I have found it useful! 

Ok I did it!!! I am not sure why this was so difficult for me. I think this comes at a time when I am feeling very insecure about my confidence in creating my own idea for the classroom and contributing to the conversation. I have been a student for so long I am very good at going to class and answering the questions my professors ask me but when it come to planning my own lessons and commenting on edubloggers I have zero confidence. Is this normal? I know that I am not supposed to be perfect or have all of the answers but I think I need to be a little more confident! This might be a good time for fake it till you make it!

I do have something to contribute and I will be a great teacher!! Thanks for sticking with me for this frustrated post! From here on out  I will be more confident and positive!

Lots of Questions

This semester as we have been learning about new tech tools, how to flip our classroom, incorporate cell phones, and utilize all google has to offer, I have been thinking about how classrooms are changing and how hard it is for teachers to change. I will be a relatively young teacher when I start teaching next year and I am hesitant to use technology in my classroom. What if I plan a lesson centered around technology and something goes wrong, the internet is not working or the website that I would like my students to use is down? Do I plan two lessons? Do we just try again? I know that problems like this are occurring less often in many schools but in some schools internet is still an issue.

We have read articles explaining that we cannot teach the way we were taught, but how do you decide what type of technology or how much to incorporate. What is enough and what is distracting? Do I need to use technology to move forward as an educator? I feel that I have learned a lot about effective ways to implement different tech tools or tech strategies in teaching but when I am a full time new teacher I fear that I am going to go back to what I am comfortable with and what I know. How do I prevent that?

I have been learning a lot through reading the edubloggers and I think that is a good solution to keep my teaching up to date and to push myself as an educator. I hope that I will be able to teach with people who also would like work to be innovative in incorporating technology or in pushing themselves as teachers. I am excited about all of the technology that we have learned about this semester but worried about actually using it. What do you all think? What are you going to use or not use? How will you decide?

This year is for us to learn how to be the most effective teacher we can be. I would like to try to incorporate some of the tech tools that I have learned about this semester but how do I balance this with trying to learn all of the other aspects of teaching and working in someone else's classroom?

I am sorry for all of the questions in the post but this is where my mind goes when I think about everything we have learned this semester and how I am going to be able to apply it all come January.

Cell Phones in the Classroom

As some of you know I have been fairly reluctant and even resistant to some of the tech tools that have been presented and how useful they would be in a math classroom. But recently I have been coming around! The presentation by Liz Kolb on cell phones in the classroom and the webinar that I watched about twitter got my wheels turning about using technologies and devices in the classroom.

Liz Kolb showed us some very interesting websites to use to get students involved in class through their cell phones. There are a couple of different ways and different apps and websites that Lisa showed us that I would like to try using in my classroom. The first is remind101. I have seen other teachers use this and I think it is a useful tool. My mentor teacher always posts the homework to the class moodle website but I think that some parents and students would find it easier and more useful to receive a text.

Another website tool that Liz suggested was polltgo.com a website that allows you to poll your students instantly. This is something that we have seen our professors and others use or some other type of polling website that allows students or audience members to respond. I really like this idea to get students involved in the class discussion or to share answers that some quieter students may not feel comfortable with but I have some concerns. I like that the tool allows for the students to have anonymity when responding to questions in class which would hopefully help with participation and allow students to guess if they do not know without being embarrassed. But I am afraid with the anonymity comes the ability to goof off and give ridiculous answers. I would like to think that I will have created a classroom where this is would be unacceptable but I have seen adults not take these polls seriously and take advantage of the anonymity. I do like that some of the other sites similar to polltogo.com that Liz showed us can have people sign in so students' name or login name would be attached to their post. I believe that this would eliminate some of the abuse of the poll but I also think that it may take away the advantage of having less confident students involved in the conversation. I do still think that completing a poll on their cell phones may reach a different group of students than a normal class discussion.

Along with polltogo.com I believe that twitter could be an interesting tool to use in the classroom. I am going to have to look into it more to see what trouble students can get into on twitter before encouraging my students to use it in the classroom or for homework but it could be a good tool for homework help or another way to have a class discussion while we are in the classroom. I am also excited for the networking possibilities of twitter. I never knew you could connect with people in such constructive ways through twitter.

I am excited to learn more and try some things out. I think that I would like to do some testing with the polling and see how it goes in the classroom. I foresee using it in a warm up in the future! I will keep you posted on how it goes!

Technology at a Small High School

So far from my experience student teaching at a small high school technology has been an interesting area to explore. By "small" I am talking around 300 students make up the student body. The school is an accredited International Baccalaureate high school, the student body is academically driven and focused. This forward thinking curriculum and academic work ethic I imagined coming with cutting edge technology. That is not the case.

The school has a computer lab and two computer carts and every classroom has a document projector and a smart board, so there is not shortage of technology but the functionality of the technology is more of the issue. There are always at least one or two computers in the computer lab that do not work and the same goes for the laptop carts. In my mentor's teacher's classroom we have only used the laptop cart once but the word in the teacher lounge is that one of the laptop carts is much better than the other and competition is pretty fierce to get the "good" laptop cart. Another issue that my placement school has with technology is that there is not designated "tech" person. There is not a librarian or  technology trained person at the school. The lead teacher has been designated this person by default but has no experience or qualifications to be a technology expert. This makes fixing the broken computers in the computer lab and on the laptop carts difficult. The lack of computers has not affected my classroom as much as it has affected other teachers classrooms.  But there aren't enough computers for an entire class to do research which some of the other teachers struggle with.

Another aspect of the small school that the tech study help me think about was the school's device policy. There are no phones allowed out in the hallways or used in class for non-educational use. Inside the classrooms it is up to the teachers to decide how they  In my mentor teacher's classroom the students are allowed to use their phones as their planners or to take pictures of some of the group work that we do in class. There are also two students who do all of their work on their computers. When working on my tech in my placement survey I discussed with my mentor teacher how he felt about students using technology in his classroom. He said he did not mind as long they were using as a learning tool. This policy seems to be the norm at this school, but in talking with the students there is one teacher who lets them have the phones out and text if they would like. I thought this was interesting. According to the student who I was speaking to the teacher's idea behind his policy is that the students are going to text anyway so he might as well let them text and get back to work then have them spend time hiding the text from the teacher. I thought this was an interesting policy. I would be interested to see how this policy plays out in his classroom.

I have always thought of technology as a distraction but after the cell phone presentation and seeing how limiting a lack of technology can be I wonder if we let student bring their own device if our classrooms may be more productive?

How to Decide When to use Technology in the Classroom

When we learn about new technology tools or application of tools for the classroom I am always thinking about how I can incorporate these tools to be effective in my math classroom. On Thursday we listened to a very interesting presentation on the use of Google apps in the classroom and presentation on Prezi in the classroom. Although I have used both of these tools for my own learning I have never used Prezi or Google apps to enhance my student's learning. Both have very good uses in the classroom but come with some warnings.

Our classmates showed us how effective Prezi can be in the classroom but they also showed us some of the ways that Prezi can be distracting and ineffective in the classroom. Prezi is a very helpful tool for seeing connection between concepts, ideas, or different representations. For my math methods class we just read about how graphic organizers can help show some of the students misconceptions and understanding of the connections in a math classroom. Prezi could be a productive way to give my students the opportunity to be creative in math class. The warning that our classmates gave us about Prezi is if it is done incorrectly it can be disgracing and take away from the material you are presenting or you students are presenting in the classroom. This would be a major aspect when looking at my students creations about the connections in the unit or throughout the year. I can imagine a lot of different ways to scaffold the connections in math with Prezi.

The other tool that we learned about on Thursday were some of the Google apps. I can see how helpful the Google apps could be for me as a teacher to organize my lessons and units with other teachers and for myself. But right now I do not see many effective ways to use the Google apps to help my students in math (I would be open to suggestions!). As I am learning more and more about assessment I think that a student portfolio can be a strong assessment tool. Pete Pasque showed us how Google can be used to help our students organize their online portfolios. If I do use Prezi in the way that I outlined above Google could be a nice tool to help students organize their different Prezis for each unit or concept. But using Google as the platform for their final portfolio is not the most effective use of the Google tool. Because I think instead of assessing their mathematical knowledge I think I would be assessing their use of technology and scanning abilities to upload a lot of the handwritten homework, test, and projects. I would like to do some more exploring of equation editors to possibly move toward an online portfolio in math classrooms.

I am excited to learn about more tools that I can use in my math classroom to bring a more creative twist to math! 

Last Class of the Summer

In looking at common core standard and smarter balanced assessment I have been thinking about assessment in a whole new way. I have been reading about assessment for my concept paper for our EDUC 606 class. I have been reading about what standardized test are actually testing vs. what people think or use the test for. Currently standardize test only test what a student knows, not how they learn, how much a student could learn or how successful a student they are.  But people use these test to decide how "good" a school is, if the teachers in the school are good, if the students are "smart" or "capable".

With this new smarter balanced assessment I wonder what other things people will falsely interpret and how the results will be skewed by the use of a computer as the format of the test. We discussed in class the different ways we would have to prepare our students for taking a test on the computer and the different challenges the different subject areas face but we did not really discuss how capable young people are with technology.

Clearly some of the test taking strategies are different when they are asked to write complete sentences to explain their answers and math and have no opportunity to explain their answers with a drawing or in math equations. But should we worry about them knowing how to operate  a computer? I know that not all kids have access to a computer at home by the time they reach us in high school how fluent will they be with a keyboard and finding the symbols on the keyboard? I would assume this would be incredibly dependant on where you are teaching. But is it fair to have students take a test in a format they are not familiar with or do not know how to use? or a better question is this equitable? Whose shoulders does it fall on to make sure that all students can operate a keyboard or know how to drag and drop an object?

It seems to me that the students who are going to have to hardest time taking a test on a computer are the students who are already struggling with the lack of an educational environment at home. Student's whose families cannot afford a computer or a smart phone. How will they learn if their school cannot afford to give them all enough time in the computer lab? How can we make sure that they are all comfortable with the keyboard? Whose class time does that come out of?

I realize that this post is a lot of questions but I think I need to think about these questions a little longer before I make a decision or start to formulate how I will teach in these situations.