Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
As a long-time education technology “lurker,” I am fascinated by the ways educators are engaging students with web technologies. Math classes have been hesitant to include web technology due to the difficulty and lack of MathType and other programs that allow users to insert mathematical notations. I understand this hesitation as I never want to force technology into a lesson just for the sake of including technology. However, when the tech enhances a lesson, it’s a powerful tool. Fortunately, my priorities for my students have shifted from computation skills and procedural tasks to conceptual understanding and explanations. MathType is still unavailable on many sources and is tedious to include on other sites, but I do not expect my students to rely on it often. Instead, students will use words to explain how their methods help solve problems. In our LMS, Schoology, students can hold discussions with their classmates. I may ask students to create a public blog post about specific problems. Students will use social bookmarking sites to keep track of high quality math resources. Finally, I may ask my students to create videos explaining their process and why it was valid. I cannot wait to further enhance my classroom with web technologies.
Math with Ms. Hollander 
Hi Bethann!
I’ve always been curious about how technology integrates into a math class, for many of the reasons you’ve stated in your post. I think that looking at the issue through the lens of the conceptual understanding and explanation aspects is very smart! Having proctored statewide testing for many years, I will tell you that it’s painful to watch students try and explain their answers to problems. As you stroll around the room and look over their shoulders, you watch them do the computations with relative ease, yet come to a dead stop when asked to explain in words how they did it all.
I like your idea of student videos. Although our subjects (Spanish) are very different, I do a lot of student videos in my class. If you proceed with this idea in your class I think you will find that not only do the kids love it, but it has the benefit of making them really think about what they do and how they do it. They process in a way for videos that they don’t necessarily do on paper. Good luck with it all?
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Hi Bethann,
You bring up some great points in your post. Technology should never be included in a lesson just for the sake of using technology. When technology is used to enhance a lesson, it can make a great impact on student learning and understanding. I like your current technology practice of using Schoology, to have students post discussion responses about how they solved a problem. I can see myself using the same idea when having students explain or analyze certain aspect of our social studies curriculum. In my lesson, I like to ask questions to students through chat or poll pods and I can see myself having post deeper responses that explain or analyze something. This allows them to look at things on a deeper level, while communicating and sharing with classmates. I also like your current practice of using social bookmarking. Social bookmarking can be a great tool and I plan on having my students use a social bookmarking site to gather resources and materials for our unit portfolio projects.
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You’ll find that blogging is a great way to get students engaged and thinking critically! I love the idea of including other technology as well as videos. We definitely do not want to just inject random tech tools into our lessons for the sake of being “cool”, we should carefully weight he pros and cons of various tools and how they mesh with our classroom or lessons. Blogging isn’t for every teacher or student, and it isn’t for every lesson or unit. It does pay to have an open mind about them though! I cannot wait to see what you come up with on these assignments!
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Whoops! “weight the pros and cons”. Typo!
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