A Teacher Thinking About Everything

I enjoyed a lot about this class, especially playing with new tools and experimenting. I know that I personally tend to skim over the recommended articles or videos and prefer to try stuff on my own (succeed and fail). This is not the best method for everyone, but trial and error has been my m.o. since the days of huge published explanations of word processors. One challenge for me was remembering to do everything; I think perhaps an email reminder once per week might help.
I was already pretty comfortable experimenting with things, but this class forced me to make the time to do so. It also exposed me to a number of possibilities that I didn’t know existed. That one website with millions of Web 2.0 applications (including Kallout) was really eye-opening! Very cool to know that so many new things are being developed.
Thanks for all of the work that y’all put into this class too. It really was exciting!

I chose to share my Quizlet with Sandy and Kemi, the other JH math teachers, via email. It was easy to share this way because I had emailed myself the link from the site. Later on I followed up with them in person, and they were enthusiastic about the tool (quizlet, not me, ha ha ha).  I think that they will consider using this tool when they cover the topic in pre-algebra in future years, and they might even create their own quizlets. Hopefully we’ll also spread the word throughout the JH about how useful this could be, for both students and teachers, in many classes.

Sharing is fun!

Many students (well, actually many people period) confuse GCF (greatest common factor) and LCM (least common multiple). My students in past years have often wanted extra practice on the topic. So to address this, I created a Quizlet for LCMs and GCFs. I emailed the Quizlet to myself, then edited the message to spell out more clearly for the students what they could/should do with the Quizlet. Then I added it to the homework assignment, recommending that they take some time to enjoy it, playing with both “Scatter” and “Space Race.”

Overall this went well. I think they learned from it and enjoyed themselves. If I were to do it again, I’d ponder bringing them to the computer lab for a day to play with this. I’d also consider a way to keep track of, ultimately, how they did on the quiz they took. (These could go together.) But I’m not unhappy with using this simply as an extra learning tool for them to enjoy and get more practice on, if they want. It also helped introduce them to the Quizlet website in case they wanted to create little flashcards or quizzes for themselves!

I think the easiest way to share information about new tools with other teachers would be on FirstClass…posting, for example, to the JH Faculty Conference if I wanted to share with the JH teachers, or emailing the math department. For example, I love puzzlemaker.com for crosswords and the like. Right now I usually wait until someone has the need though, because I think it sticks more at that time….and I know people worry about all the things they “should” be doing otherwise.

After playing with Jigzone and creating a few online jigsaw puzzles of my family (cool how you can change the size, shape, and number of pieces on the fly), I played with LetterPop and wrote a newsletter (saved to my account) that I will likely use for future years to advertise my parent discussion evenings. I had already used and enjoyed Writeboard back in Lesson 2 or something and enjoyed going back to look at my posting.
I then used one of the suggested search tools to look through a slew of super-cool Web 2.0 sites. I played with a few, then settled on exploring KallOut. Once you install this tool, all you have to do is highlight a word–in your web browser or in a word processor (etc.) and it brings up an icon if there is interesting information to be had on the highlighted topic. If word processing, this is a great way to research on the fly without having to go back and forth between applications. (KallOut brings up a cool little window while leaving your application untouched.) If I can get used to doing this instead of opening up a separate tab to Google every time, I can certainly be more productive. I’ve of course already used this in my Gmail to find information on those who email me, and naturally I have also done an ego search. This is a pretty cool little tool!

I enjoyed deliciousness, but I did not have an easy time finding users to connect with. I ended up searching for Ultimate Frisbee, then looking for familiar names of peeps who had bookmarked the site. Seems like there should/must be an easier way.

I basically looked through the websites I already have and decided which ones to share. I like the idea, and especially like seeing how many people bookmarked the site. Seems to add some validity to my adding it, or checking it out.

I did search for Quadratic Formula and found a few cool sites, including a Quadratic Equation Calculator. I could see using this in addition to Google to find sites. I could also see befriending a math teacher, or someone with similar interests, and looking through their bookmarks regularly.

I think these are my delicious links.

Naturally I was attracted to the two Paideia wikis, and these jumped out at me. David Fergemann’s Computer Science Class and Jennifer Swift’s Lit Class were both very cool wikis. Dave’s wiki at first looked basically like any other web page, full of instructions and links. Then I discovered the student posts, filled with code and anecdotes and entertaining boasts (”I was the first one to figure this out”). Jennifer’s wiki had the instructions at the top and then student responses, prefaced by their names, at the bottom. This wiki had a ton of information and really seemed to encourage group participation (part of the assignment was to edit or append someone else’s entry to improve it). One thing that might have helped me visually was to split the wiki into different pages to more clearly differentiate sections…it seemed lengthy by the end. Maybe even just color changes or something. Still, both pages seemed wonderful, and certainly more interactive than my static web page.

I’ve used a wiki before when the JH organized our short term this way. It was fun to edit my section, but then someone had to go behind us to make our offerings look more uniform. I suspect this may be a downside to wikis, if you indeed want the page to ultimately look uniform. I suppose you could give instructions on this beforehand.

One way I could see using a wiki would be for a student to be assigned to summarize a section of the book. For example, each student could be instructed to a) define terms in the section b) explain any theorems and c) give and work out examples. I’m not sure how easy it is to include superscripts for things such as x squared, but certainly for pre-algebra they could work out problems such as 2x + 4 = 3x – 9 and show each step. Then when students went to study for a test, this could be an additional resource. A lot would depend on how thorough a job each student did on his/her section, but with the proper incentive (grade, peer pressure) it could be great!

I tried Quizlet to see what it was all about and really enjoyed it. In particular I sought out a multiplication table for my 8 year old. It was hard to find 10×10 (12×12 was easier) but once I did it was fun to create quizzes featuring fill in the blank, matching, T/F, etc. The ones that would be most useful would be fill in the blank, and it was easy to modify to fit the bill. It also had a fun game involving moving lots of expressions (5*3) on top of the result (15) as quickly as possible. I could see encouraging students to quiz themselves on all sorts of topics by generating their own quizzes and facts. You can easily email yourself the link too.

I had seen and enjoyed TeacherTube before. If I had easy access to a camera this would be a joy to use, because I would post myself and my students singing different tunes for the quadratic formula, and I could see encouraging creative raps about different mathematical processes too.

I also played with Ta-Da List, which was an easy-to-use program to create to-do lists. You email yourself the list with a single click. It looked like it would be fun to use and satisfying to check off.

Focused play is fun!

The custom news feed through Google has been great! Not only do I get the latest on the US election at a glance, but it also includes lots of video. My favorite, however, has been the description of the fake Sarah Palin Facebook page.

I’ve also enjoyed following Elisa’s posts on my reader. It’s a good way of reminding myself to keep up with Pi 2.0 because otherwise (especially with all of the Jewish holidays!) I could easily fall way behind. It also gives me a nice preview of things to come!

First of all, I have had Gmail for a while and didn’t realize I could do readers within there (or really anything about readers) so that is kind of neat.

In this case I subscribed to the NYT Education section and read about Latin making a comeback of sorts. This was interesting to me because Latin was one of 3 languages offered at Pace, while at Paideia we omit Latin and offer Spanish and French. Now Latin was always the least enrolled of the 3, and we often worried about fully enrolling Latin courses, so it was interesting to hear that various items have contributed to a comeback:

1. SAT verbal scores (of course)
2. a way to stand out on college applications (?)
3. a curiosity in the language, partly based on Harry Potter’s spells!

Anyway, it peaked my interest, and I do like the fact that so many word roots are Latin based.