If starting my masters in Educational Technology and teaching during a pandemic (both hybrid and 100% virtually) has taught me anything it is that technology in the classroom needs to be considered thoughtfully and must be adding to the lesson, not distracting from it. I think in many ways last year teachers, myself included, perhaps put too much technology in front of our students last year trying to engage and connect with them. However, usually teachers are some of the best learners and I know at least I learned that if I am going to use technology to help my students through a topic it needs to have a purpose and help, more than distract.
There are many video platforms to make a video more engaging for students to watch and learn from, Prezi, edPuzzle, VideoAnt to name a few. There are countless excellent resources and lessons created by PBS, PhET, desmos, and YouCubed that you can use and adapt for your students' needs. However, one of the most interesting resources I was introduced to this week in my CEP 805 course was The Free Learning List. This is a very simple compilation of sites, podcasts, courses, subreddits, etc. that are free to use and could enhance or engage your learners outside of just how to do the task. There are so many different avenues to explore in this list which allows you to pull in specific topics that you or your students are passionate about, but this can also be a bit overwhelming. In addition to that, while they do have a score based on their effectiveness, engagement, and popularity and a short description of the content provided it is not 100% guaranteed that everything is completely “school appropriate”. Constraints aside, I see so much potential for students to have ownership over their learning by using this site to explore topics they are truly interested in. I always love to share “fun math facts” with my students outside of just learning another algorithm that we must apply in x-situation and this site allows me to find more of those fun facts to bring in and share with my students. One specific example of this was a podcast that I was listening to about music - Key Notes - started discussing The Golden Ratio, Fibonacci Sequence, and math in music (the entire episode is embedded below). The overall summary of the podcast was that key moments in some songs happen at the “golden moment” of the song, or approximately 61.8% of the way through the song and I thought, what a fun way to hook my students into a pretty mundane topic of ratios. I had a whole idea for a mini project based on the idea, but sadly because of snow days, testing, and other demands outside of my control sadly the project was abandoned because I just couldn’t see how to fit it in. It is unfortunate that my “golden moment” project didn’t happen, and it also makes me wonder how many other fun and interesting projects or activities we could be doing with our students to add value and enrich their mathematical learning experience beyond just learning the algorithm. Integrating technology can enhance this if considered carefully as to how it elevates the lesson.
Resources:
Cuchna, C. (Host). (2021, July). The Golden Ratio, Fibonacci Sequence, and...Music? (No. 5) [Audio podcast episode]. In Key Notes, Spofity. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6PkXcoiEnD7XegE5Ei8K5s?si=NWplOJ66RcSPjwhsYxgY3Q
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When I think about who I am - mathematics is such a big part of that. I truly geek out about rediscovering new things in math with my students, or reading an interesting article about mathematics, or thinking about ways to engage my students in a way so that they can try to at least half match my mathematically geeky energy. Ideally I would come up with some amazing task in my Algebra 1 class and my students would be instantly hooked and we would have a great discussion about what they wonder or what they are noticing and they would go home, try out some practice problems and we would move on to the next thing. However - my students are not me and they each have their own things that they are extremely passionate about or sometimes have things going on that completely distract them from the joys and privileges of learning.
Taking time to consider each of my students' intersectionality is a vital part of being an effective educator. It would be wonderful to hold all of our students to a high standard and not budge but our students do not always come to us with the same tools and support that we would hope or perhaps have experienced ourselves. To a degree, as a female in a largely male- dominated subject area I have faced my own struggles with feelings of whether or not I belong in a math classroom. However, because another part of my identity is having a strong family support system that has always encouraged me to pursue my passions I have the attitude that "I was just going to show those boys that girls are good (or better) at math too".
This year has been a struggle to embrace and try to connect with some of my freshman students in Algebra 1 who come to me with extremely difficult home situations, despite this being a suburban school district. No one at home to wake them up to get to the bus, or bring them to school, no one at home when they return to encourage them to do their homework or help them if they get stuck - or even make them dinner. This year I have kept a stash of snacks in my classroom because many of my students do not have an opportunity to eat breakfast in the morning or bring lunch to school. Because my students are coming to me with all of these much greater issues, how can I then motivate them to factor the quadratic so that we can see the zeros of the graph in the equation? While my love and passion for mathematics will always be a huge part of my identity - it is true what one of my undergraduate professors said - if you aren’t going into teaching for the love of your students you are doing it for the wrong reasons. This year more than ever I have really had to care for my students and make sure they have other needs met before we even attempt to factor that fabulous quadratic equation. After a few weeks of considering how to integrate social awareness into my Data and Statistics unit for my end of the school year unit, I decided to have the unit culminate in a project. In this project, students will need to research some issue using the website Statista and then create their own survey to distribute to some of our student population to see how the data that they collect compares to that data that they have researched. The will need to display that data using multiple modes, and I also want to incorporate some big questions about what that data is telling them about the world around us. I had had an idea to do a project like this for a long time, but always struggled with the research aspect of this for myself and for my students. I think that researching a specific topic for specific data points can be a real challenge and giving students the freedom and wide-openness to do this I think would be overwhelming, so the project always sat on the back burner. However, thanks to my amazing classmates in my CEP 805 class I was introduced to the site, Statista. On their website you can search for almost any topic and find a brief overview of the topic, and then tons of different kinds of data points that you can view as line graphs, bar graphs, or get related information to that topic. I love that all of my students' research can be done in one place. That being said, one of the major downsides to Statista is that you need to sign up for an account to access the information and even after that some of the data is still behind a paywall. I haven’t decided yet if I want to ask my students to use their school email to sign up for an account because there are always privacy issues to take into account and asking students to sign up for things they aren’t comfortable with is unfair. I could simply use my login, but then I would feel like students aren’t really doing the research so there is a lot to consider. With that too, because there is so much information under one category it could be difficult for students to sift through what is important to them for their project and not. Overall I feel like perhaps the benefits outweigh the negatives here because incorporating some real world data into a mathematics project about collecting, analyzing, and displaying data in a meaningful way would be so powerful for my students to experience. Bringing math to life for them so that they see the value in what they are learning is a key factor in exciting students to learn more about that topic. |
AuthorMarissa McGregor, high school math teacher extraordinaire. I love my husband, daughter, and family dearly. Archives
August 2022
CategoriesThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. |