Blog Post 12

Search the web and find three articles or videos about how to use technology in the discipline that you want to teach. You can go to youtube and watch a video, find someone you’re following on twitter, find a technology blog, etc. and see how they use technology in the classroom. Then write a summary about each article/video and explain how it will help you use technology in your classroom.

I am going into secondary math education and I wanted to find out more about how I could use technology in my math classroom with my students. I thought this would be a good assignment to see what other techniques teachers use in their math classes.

I really enjoyed the video, “The Role of Technology in Math Education” because it talked about how important it is to have technology in the classroom which I thought was really important. They talked about how important math and technology is. This video also talked about a tutoring program that helped students in a one on one situation if they needed extra help. I think this video showed me a lot in a short time. I can have a class blog where I show the assignments and their deadlines so everyone can look on the internet if they forget. I can also have links off that page that they can click on and have different math activities that I find interesting. This way the students have more fun in class and we can all interact with each other. This reminds me of Randy Pausch’s last lecture and how he talked about the head fake. We are teaching them math on the internet but they are also being taught more about technology and are having fun doing it.

In the video, “6th grade Math Class Using PLATO Learning’s Straight Curve” it talked about how this form of technology was colorful and fun to use. It included things that students used in their daily lives. One example talked about the probability of getting a certain colored gum ball out of a gum ball machine. This type of technology also explained hard math words to where the students were able to understand what the words meant. The students can also come up and do activities on the computer to help improve their knowledge of the section being taught. It kind of reminded me of the smartboard. I could definitely see myself using PLATO in my own classroom because I saw how much fun the kids were having with it and how well they were understanding the information.

I found this really cool site called, “IXL” that is for any grades between pre-k and eighth grade. Higher levels are coming soon. You can click on any grade level. The majority of the grades have over two hundred skills to learn from. Then in each skill, there are multiple problems teaching the skill. This site shows all the math skills that eighth graders should learn in the school year. They can click on any practice activity and there is a score out of one hundred to see how they do. They also have a report section which includes sections on students’ progress towards state standards. This site is also very fun for students because they get awards for doing well in different sections. I can definitely see myself using this website in my classroom because it has so many different activities you can use. The kids obviously need to have a computer to access this information. I could put this site on a class blog so they can access it at home. I could teach a lesson and then after I feel they are getting it they can get on the computer and try activities on problems we just learned about. This looks like a really fun site and I was even excited to find something so wonderful! I actually started playing around with it and answering different questions using this program. I am excited to see what they come up with for higher levels of math courses.