When I recently did an M&M lab with my 8th Grade Math students, which was part of a lesson about changing between decimals, fractions, and percents, I thought about some of Bruce's comments to me after my presentation last Friday night. He acknowledged the challenge that math teachers face with developing good technology-based lessons, and mentioned that the best math lesson he ever personally witnessed did not make use of any modern technology whatsoever (I believed it involved doing geometry constructions). I feel that my M&M lab was a huge success, and it didn't involve any computers. I think it was the use of manipulatives (better yet- edible manipulatives), the experience of students collecting their own data, and they way they got to work in groups that made this lesson go so well. Although I am trying to think of more ways to integrate techonology into my exisiting lessons, I think this is one that is best kept as is. If we did something similar to this on computers, students would not be as excited because they would not get to EAT the M&M's at the end of the lab. I also feel that they benefit from actually touching, sorting, and counting the M&M's to collect and analyze their data.

I took some pictures of the students doing this lab on my cell phone, and and am trying to to figure out how to get them from my phone to my computer. I don't have pay for any mobile web useage in my phone plan, so I am not sure if I will be able to get the pictures to my computer without a cord (which I do not have). I tried using bluetooth, and even though my cell phone and laptop apparently read each ohter, it will not let me tranfer any files.  So much for adding pictures!

Has anyone heard about an application or some sort of ring tone that kids can download to their cell phones that plays a noise that we adults are unable to hear? Apparently the pitch it too high for adults to hear, but kids can hear it just fine. My students (7th graders) in my 4th hour class began telling me about this a week or so ago, and ever since then we have been joking around together over this subject. I initally told them that I thought they were totally making the whole thing up, that there isn't really such a noise out there. One day I pretended that I also had a noise that I could play that only adults could hear, which they enjoyed. They all claimed that they heard my noise, though no one could tell me how it sounded.

Yesterday a student asked if she could play the noise that only kids can hear just to try to prove to me that such an app really did exist. I also was thinking to myself that since I am a young adult, I might be able to still hear the noise myself. I made the decision to take a minute of our instructional time away to allow the girl to take out her phone and play the noise because the suspense was killing me (and it seemed to be an okay time do this, while we were in the transitional time between doing the warm-up and going over the homework assignment).  She played it and all the kids made a big commotion over it. Some complained that it was very unpleasant to hear. I couldn't hear it all.

So this really does exist, they were not just pulling my leg. My student told me that the sound can be used as a ring tone and that her and other kids use it to be sneaky about texting when around their parents. They can know when a new text is received by hearing the signal, but adults in the room would have no idea.

All of this made me very curious. I wondered about why adults would create a ring tone that would allow kids to do shady things behind our backs.  After doing a little google searching, I found out that these "ultrasonic" ringtones are not a recent development  (an MSNBC article from 2006 was calling them "new" back then), and that ultrasonic tones like this were first used as a way to keep kids from loitering in front of stores.

Apparently not all kids find these tones overly unpleasant now, if they are choosing to use them for ringtones.

Here is a link to the article to which I referred:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13274669/

I'm excited that I re-discovered the "Math Playground" website this past week. Another teacher suggested that we use it with the students to review adding fractions. When I checked out the site I realized it was the same site I had used in the past to teach about functions when I taught at the high school level. I had never really explored it when I used it in the past; I had only just come across it from google searching "function machine" and I only used the function machine part of the website. Now I have noticed many great features of this website and how it has a great variety of topics, many which I will cover in my 7th and 8th grade math classes this year. I have enjoyed the interactive practice opportuntites that it gives and have incorporoated some of those into my classroom, but on my own I have also checked out the virtual manipulatives and math games that can also be accessed through this site. There are some really awesome ones on there! One that I espeically like is on prime factorization. It guides you through making a factor tree for two different numbers, then allows you to drag the numbers in to a venn diagram to find the greatest common factor and the least common multiple. Wish I would have discovered this BEFORE I had to teach about this!  I think this online manipulative is a powerful way to PRESENT and EXPLAIN the concepts and skills related to prime factorization, not just practice to them (and I think these types of online resources are sometimes hard to find for math)! I will hopefully remember this website next year when I it comes time to teach this concept!

Here is the link for the "Prime Factorization" online manipulatives that I think are especially good:


http://www.mathplayground.com/factortrees.html

Less than 48 hours remaining and a lot to do! Yesterday I focused on getting A TON of school work done so I could focus on stuff for EDU 590 these next few days.

Today our tech. director sent us links to four articles about using iPods in the classroom, in response to an email a teacher had sent out pretty much complaining how our district had spent money on these devices. The teacher had mentioned that she used ipods to have kids to do conversions, but she wondered why calculators just couldn't be used instead. Our director replied that iPods could be used as so much more than just calculators, and then made the point that we need to realize effective uses of technology in the classroom. He provided four links to articles which show how various school districts and teaching professionals have incorporated the use if iPods into their everyday teaching. I will share these as well:

http://www.schoolcio.com/ShowArticle/1014

http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/sites/sites070.shtml


http://eww.kcci.com/technology/11047811/detail.html 

http://www.classroom20.com/forum/topics/how-do-you-use-ipods-in-class


I personally feel that I don't even know enough about how to use an iPod myself right now (I don't even have one for personal use) to set up some for student use in some of the ways that these articles describe, like putting videos of lessons taught on an iPod for students who were absent to get caught up.  I feel as though I would need to attend a whole conference on using iPods in the classroom to really understand enough about using them in an effective way.

Does anyone know how to change the time zone for our postings? For some reason this blog says I post things three hours before I actually do. It is almost 11pm now. My other blogs through this same account give accurate eastern standard times, so I wonder why this one doesn't.  Hopefully I can find it in the settings somehow!

I am afraid my pre and post assessments for the experiment with my students are probably not of the expected format. I am just going to admit this - the pre and post assessments (which were pretty much identical) looked like a quiz. I did not have my students do a project or "create" anything so to speak, which would have been great and as it sounds many of you have been doing. I did not have enough time to give more than one day's class period for this experiment, and did not have time to fit in an actual project, although I'm sure it would have been valuable.  Even though my assessment was pretty much a quiz, I still definitely tried incorporating open-ended questions that required slightly higher order thinking skills than what would be on a typical mini-math quiz that others from my department and I would normally give.  For example, some of the questions were:

 “Explain what an inequality is in your own words.”

and

“What are two similarities between equations and inequalities?” (I also asked for 2 differences.)

and

“Describe the process for how to graph an inequality.”

My next task will be to try to make a rubric to accompany the quiz, which I do not think will be very easy, but I will figure it somehow.

I think my lesson with technology went well today! Even though I was disappointed that the wireless mouse that I had been given didn't function properly, the kids were super pumped about coming up to my computer to click the answer choices for the questions from our "interactivity". Kids who have NEVER volunteered before were eagerly waving their hands, wanting to come up and try out a problem! It was awesome to have so many kids wanting to participate. I think they especially liked the sound effects that the program made after they submitted their answers. It makes a ding if correct and buzz noise if wrong, and also when it's wrong a hint comes up. I hope to give the class a little taste of what this “interactivity” is like when I give my presentation. I hope to put some screen shots from it into my power point, but maybe I can link to the actual website and show that for a moment as well.

I felt bad about my 4th hour kids who were deprived by not getting the cool technology version of the lesson plan.  They probably chatted with the first hour kids who got it and were bummed that their lesson wasn’t quite as cool.

Today I was bummed out because the wireless mouse that was given to me for free this weekend does not work from all over in my classroom like I had hoped. It only works from within about a 3 foot radius from my laptop.  I talked to another teacher who said his works from anywhere in his classroom, and he said his is a logitech one and it was only $20ish from Target. I really want to buy one because I use power points pretty much every day and I hate having to go up and press the space bar all of the time. I had a few students who told me they had wireless mice at home that their families do not use that they would give me to try, and I said if their parents were okay with donating one to the school, that would be awesome! So we'll see if anyone brings one tomorrow.

I am lacking an interactive white board, but I think having a wireless mouse would be great because we have several math activities and games on our textbook website that just involve mouse clicking, no typing, and a wireless mouse that works from anywhere in the classroom would give me a way to let kids volunteer to do problems without having to leave their seats (I like having them come to the board sometimes too of course, but this would let me mix things up a bit)! Hopefully I will get one soon and I can incorporate these "interactivities" from our textbook website more often.

.

One of the questions I included on my survey was, "For which content area(s) do you feel technology is the easiest to incorporate?"  Science and language arts were the top picks, but social studies and math were not much further behind.  As a math teacher, I do not feel worried about not knowing enough possible ways to use technology with my students. I feel like I possess the knowledge, tools, and resources to do many exciting things that involve technology. My problem, however, is incorporating the nine best strategies that our book talks about into my mathematics classroom.  And from what I am learning, just throwing random technology into the classroom that is not in the context of one of these strategies will probably not be as beneficial to the students. I think other math teachers would agree that our content area is not the easiest for creating student-centered projects that many of these strategies seem to be about (and isn't it ironic that in our textbook there are a ton of cool examples and illustrations, but none that are from the math content area, at least not from what I noticed). I have gone to conferences about incorporating more strategies like these nine into the math classroom, but when I come back to the realities of needing to teach objectives at a certain pace and needing to be on track with the other teachers in my building who teach the same courses I do, sometimes these strategies don't seem very practical.

Tonight I have been looking through our textbook and making some final decisions about the "experiment" for class which I will be conducting this week.  I will be attempting to use the strategy "Providing Feedback", and I will be using a cool "interactivity" from our online textbook during my lesson that will provide different practice questions aligned with our learning objectives for the day. The "interactivities" through our textbook are great because they provide instant feedback, are visually pleasing, and include fun sounds that the students will enjoy.

My students will not get to use individual computers, but we will do the online activity together as a class, using my laptop and projector. I plan to use a wireless mouse as well to let different students be involved in solving the various practice questions.  Ideally, each students would be using their own computer for the activity we will be doing,  but I can only give one day for this experiment and I have not used computers with my students yet this year.  I know the first time I have the kids use them it will probably take most of the class period to explain procedures related to using the computers and we would need to make sure they could all log in properly. I do not want to try to do this experiment the same day that it is our first day using computers in my class, because I know it would be a disaster! Hopefully allowing students to click the answers to the practice questions using the wireless mouse will be a sufficient way of getting the students interested and involved!

Yay for me finally getting my blog for this class started! EDU 590 is my first graduate class, and it has been very hard for me to find time to work on the assignments as I'm usually at school doing school work until 7 or 8, then I go home and do more school work until I go to bed. Why do I feel like a first year teacher when it's my third year?  I do not want to sound like a complainer because I LOVE my job when I'm with the kids, and you, my classmates out there, definitely know how it is! I just wanted to explain myself a little since I seem like such a slacker by starting my blogs with less than a week of class left!

Anyway... this weekend I realized I needed to start getting things done for this class! Getting this blog set up was easy for me, because I already had a blogger account. I already have blogs through blogger for the classes I teach, so I just had to go to my dashboard and create a new blog.  If anyone is interested in seeing my class blogs, they are

oplandalgebra1a.blogspot.com and oplandmath1.blogspot.com.

The primary reason I have these blogs is to post daily homework assignments. Students rarely communicate with me via commenting on my blog, but I tell them that they may if they wish to. If I ever want to create an assignment for them which requires them posting something on my blog, at least I have the means to do so now.

If you check out either of my class blogs, you will notice several headings that look like they should be links, but the links don't work. My intention was to have the links connect to files that would be uploaded on my district webspace.  I have done this in the past, and it worked out nicely, since blogger doesn't have a way to put up actual files (like pdf or word documents, for example), as far as I know. But this past summer our district was remodeling the district website and they did not provide a way for teachers to create webpages until a few weeks into the school year.  I had hoped to set up my district website before the school year actually started, but since there was no way of doing that, I was unable to put links on my class blogs to files which I had previously stored on my district web space (like my syllabus, calendar, etc). I still have yet to learn about how to create my own website on our newly revamped district site, but hopefully I can do that soon. Then I will actually be able to fix the links on my class blogs.

For our survey for class, I ended up just making my own using mostly questions we created as a class, but I added some district-specific ones and a few others that I thought of last-minute, as well. I was curious to see how many people in my district actually figured out how to create a homepage on our new district website (because we were only provided with instructions for how to set one up online). Out of the 38 teachers who have responded to my survey so far, only 21% of them said they had a teacher homepage though our district's website. Evidently there are others who have created some type of site on their own, like me, because 37% of the teachers claimed to have some sort of class website, even if not from their district webspace.