After reading the articles Why Teachers Matter and The importance of mathematics teachers’ beliefs, I am hopeful. As a pre-service teacher, the push for teaching now and in the future is inquiry based learning. Too often I think the idea of inquiry based teaching and learning is misunderstood and thus becomes overwhelming. These articles, although stressed that students beliefs were shaped by their experiences in the classroom, also focused on different teaching strategies aside from inquiry. They demonstrated that inquiry learning was helpful and made an impact on students but also gave evidence that direct teaching and large group discussions were also shown to produce successful students.
These articles did examine different strategies and both pointed out that it is important to make math real to ensure students can see the real life connections, however, they did it in a manner that seemed possible. I often feel very overwhelmed when trying to wrap my head around inquiry learning and teaching and coming up with good examples that are relevant. After reading these articles, I feel more confident that inquiry is not as hard as I first anticipated.
I aIso found it very interesting in Goos’ article about how students relate their lives and objects in their lives to mathematics and how they envision a typical math teacher. On average the students related math to objects they were not fond of and described typical math teachers as boring and old-fashioned. As a pre-service teacher, I hope to be able to break these stereotypes down for my students and pass on my love of math to them.
Much like these articles explained, students can sense a teacher’s attitude towards a certain subject and if students feel that teachers are not putting in their best effort, there would be no reason for students to either. As pre-service teachers, we need to be sure that we want to be where we are to ensure that are students are as successful as we anticipate them to be. As educators we need to instill our positive sense of on-going learning onto our students to help them see the importance in the work they are doing. I think that teaching any subject can be tricky and math is definitely among these. Trying to sell the idea of math being relevant and necessary in a students life will be a task that every teacher is faced with, day in and day out.
Today in class we discussed Pythagorean Theorem. The examples given were a great visual and really helped me understand the concept of the theorem. One thing I am not sure of is how this can be applied to my day to day life? Does anybody have any ideas for me?
For my final project, I teamed up with Denise Phaneuf to teach a couple statistic lessons specifically on Normal Distribution. Seth Dickens classroom in Italy were our students. Seth had originally wanted us each to teach a lesson but was more than ecstatic to hear we wanted to work together. Seth had suggested we teach one longer lesson, but after running the idea by our teacher, Dean Shareski, and receiving feedback from him, we decided on doing two shorter lessons. With two shorter lessons, it would allow us to receive feedback from the students and Seth, so that we could improve our second time around.
As Denise and I began the project, we threw around many ideas as to how we would plan this lesson. Being this was our first lesson we had ever taught, we were a little uncertain.
In the beginning stages of our project, we spent a couple afternoons gathering information and deciding how we could tie the two lessons together. We finally came up with putting all our collected information into Google Presentations. After we collaborated the basic information in the slide show, we uploaded the presentation to VoiceThread. Because of the great time difference between here and Italy, we figured this was the best way to go about teaching the lesson. We added thorough comments to each slide and if the kids didn’t understand something when they watched the lesson, they could add their own comments as well.
Seth was really great in helping us through every stage of the first lesson. After getting the lesson ready, he provided us with some early feedback. One thing he suggested was that we add a few definitions of key words that his students may not know because their first language isn’t English. After deciding how we would go about doing this, we posted the presentation as a draft to his blog, allowing him to post it when he felt ready. Along with the presentation, we wrote another post with key words such as property, forever and symmetric. Along with both of these posts, we made a Google Form that the students were to fill out after watching the lesson. The questions were easy to answer questions that would help us plan our second lesson and allow us to improve from our first. The first presentation and Google Form are posted below:
Click here to see the Google Form. I cannot get the form to embed.
We ran into our first problem when we found out Seth had been ill the day he had planned to show the lesson to his class. The lesson and everything to go with it had been posted and some students had filled out the Google Form, so we figured we would be able to construct our second lesson even though not as many students had answered as we had liked. Before we finished our second lesson, Seth gave us some great feedback that definitely helped improve our second lesson. Although we thought we were helping the students better understand the lesson, we had a lot of “meta language” in our presentation. Examples of this would be saying things like “you know when” or “it’s kinda like.” These were things that we never really things we had thought about but for someone learning English, this slang we use can become very confusing. Seth used a voice recording to show us how our first slide would sound in Italian and how confusing the extra language can be. He also suggested slowing it down a bit and making it a little more interactive with the students. He also presented us with another voice recording to help us grade our language to make it easier to be understood. So with all these things we recorded our second lesson and I think it turned out fairly good. Here it is:
So after teaching my first lesson, I must say it involves a whole lot of work! The difficulties began with teaching students that we had no idea what their background knowledge was. Language definitely created a large barrier in trying to teach this lesson also. I feel we did a fairly good job trying to get past both of these barriers. Another thing I found challenging was teaching the lesson to only a voice recorder. Because we didn’t teach the lesson live, there was no way to ask the students if they were still following along or if they had any questions as we were going through it. I also found it difficult because I wanted to teach with my hands and found myself pointing to the screen to help get a point across that I was trying to say. I also found it a little challenging to think of good visual slides and interesting things to say to keep the students interested.
Overall, this project was a great experience and really taught me important things about teaching lessons. I found there to be a lot of preparation work to get the lesson together. I can see this time being cut a bit if presenting a live lesson but it would still be a lot of work. This project gave me a taste of being in classroom and working with students and I loved that!
I have never heard of th term digital footprints before class last week, but I did know such a thing existed. I have Googled myself before but never thought much of it. One of the main reasons I probably have never thought about it is because nothing bad comes up. When I search my name on Google, it is mainly sports results that show up but there are a few others. Whether it’s how many goals I scored in a soccer tournament in Saskatoon or my roster information for the University of Regina Softball Team, nothing seems to far out there. Even when searching Google Images, it is interesting to find four acutal pictures of me. Although there are reandom ones of other people, I was completely surprised to find actual photos of me. As to if I plan to change anything to make this footprint better, I’d have to say no. There are no bad things that show up on me and even out of the things that do show up, I have only acutally made a few of them myself, while the others are from other people posting things.
