iMovie

Math Spreadsheet

I recently created an excel spreadsheet where students would enter the root(s) of polynomials.  As many projects as I have done with Excel, this is definitely the first time I've used the program in a way that I can actually use in my math classroom.  To be honest, this is possibly my favorite project thus far for 2 reasons:  Excel is the first program to allow math students the freedom of entering in actual mathematical expressions, and I really think this would be a great idea to integrate into my classroom.  By the completion of my project, I felt that it did not only have an aesthetic quality, but it looks like it would be more fun for students to figure out solutions through my polynomial spreadsheet.  All in all, I give a two thumbs up to the TPTE 486 project.   Below is a screenshot of my excel spreadsheet -- I'm quite proud of it:)

Blogging Down My Thoughts

I came home today from school only to find that my electricity was out.  It finally came back at 2 in the morning, and now I have my chance to blog...  Today turned out to be a harsh epiphany that I've tucked so far away from my consciousness that it took 8 hours of no electricity for me to find within myself again.  Maybe this previous sentence was gobbledygook, but I never said I was a good writer.

No Electricity:  I thought to myself, let's get busy and do some homework.  Then I realized that I needed the internet for all of my courses, so that's a no-go.  Then I figured I can do some chores.  But the chores that I needed done also depended on electricity... So I ended up being extremely lazy for about 8 hours.  The time spent without electricity reminded me of what I always thought was most important: survival skills.  I vowed to myself in my early twenties that I wanted to learn how to grow my own food, create my own necessities, and know how to survive in the wild-- we can't always rely on technology for the rest of our lives, can we?

Web 2.0:  I've become a bit bored talking about my "home blackout" ordeal (it's been on my mind all day), so I'd like to move on and touch base with the web 2.0 tools I've learned about for the past couple of weeks.  I must admit that none of the websites would benefit me in teaching my future math students.  On the up side, I must admit that they are all fun to fool around with.  Sometimes I wonder if math is best taught and learned through the "whiteboard" process and cooperative group learning...

Inspiration:  Inspiration is such a fun and great concept mapping tool.  But it was totally uninspiring when it comes to the mathematics field.  Now is my chance to complain about a software program.  First, Inspiration does not allow me to enter in formal math equations, which makes it hard to want to use it for math in the first place.  Secondly, The program does not allow multiple font justifications within one box (i.e. If you "center" your first sentence, you cannot align your next sentence to the left or right within that same box).  Finally, Inspiration had absolutely no way of putting in math functions.... I know I said that already, but this was the most frustrating part.  I worked so long and hard on this project that there is no doubt I'm proud of it and that I will show it to my future students.  Frankly, I was excited to use Inspiration, but I'm not sure if I would ever use this again... The future of this program is to hopefully focus on more possibilities for math teachers to use it -- I mean, we matter too:)

Calculus Inspiration

Scavenger Hunt

Cats: The 8th Wonders of the World!

I created my very first Picasa -- Just push play and check it out!

Web 2.0

Last week I learned about Prezi and Picnic.  Prezi was pretty impressive because it's way more entertaining to learn from these Prezi creation rather than from your usual powerpoint presentation.  This is because Prezi is set up to handle many animations and it seems to transition smoothly, making the presentation seem more like a movie and less like the ones our teachers continue to teach with (powerpoint).  However, I do not see myself using this tool for my Math students.  As for Picnic, I feel like it's the closest free editing program that we can use to edit our pictures without having to spend all of my money on PhotoShop.  Although this website was fun to use, this is another web 2.0 tool that I don't think I'll be using for my High School Math students.

Tomorrow, Billy and I will be presenting our wiki on Smilebox.  I discovered how to put my creation on a blog, so here goes!

This picture slideshow personalized with Smilebox

Google Docs Totally Rocs!

So this past weekend was filled with me trying to catch up in this class from suffering a horrible illness.  What was worst was that I became ill in  the middle of my FIRST ever online collaboration project!  I was partnered up with my awesome math-education girl, Whitney and I couldn't help but show up to class Thursday morning -- like I said, it was my first online group project, so I didn't feel comfortable not talking to Whitney about our lesson plan.  We finalized our plans, and I bolted out of class after 30 minutes of trying to sit still.... And then I begin to work on the lesson plan...

It was the funniest thing. I went onto GoogleDocs and Whitney just so happened to get online at the same time.... and we pretty much chatted for at least 30 minutes on our activity sheet: it was the craziest thing I had ever experienced! I saw exactly where her cursor was and it was so much fun seeing her type up her sentences -- I never realized how much we sometimes STOP in order to think about what we should say next (or how we want to put our thoughts into words) and how much we end up deleting because of typing mistakes. The experience made me realize that I should've never been too scared to stay at home with a nauseating fever.... GoogleDocs was such a great tool for Whitney and I to communicate.  It was the best of both worlds: We were able to talk about the project and edit it at the same time. This experience with the lesson plan has definitely changed my resistance to technology/internet-based assignments tremendously from the way I felt about it earlier in the week... I'm not scared anymore *laughs*

As for the new websites introduced last week, Delicious and Glogster, I don't have much to say about them because I see no real benefits with these sites when it comes to teaching my math students. I have to say one thing, though: Whitney and I actually used her Delicious account in order to bookmark the websites that we wanted to use for our lesson plan! I remember when Whitney and her partner started to complete their wiki page on Delicious, and I think I remember us laughing about it because we had no idea there were websites out there specifically for people to save their bookmarks... little did we know that we would need to turn to Delicious in order to help us with an important project.

I think I'm getting used to this technology stuff. What a glorious day!

Wordle & Twitter

Wordle:  I'd like to sum up this Web 2.0 tool with one word:  AWESOMEST.  This online program is so much fun... I mean, look at what I created by copying and pasting a paragraph from my first, autobiographical blog (To the right).  Pretty cool, I know.  Obsessed with arts-n-krafts, I absolutely love things like this... but as for classroom use, there's no reason as to why I would present this to my high school math students.  I don't like saying that, because it makes me think about the fact that I just learned about this fantastic website at the age of 24 -- and I wish I could tell everyone about Wordle, but it would seem inappropriate to bring up something that has absolutely nothing to do with my math subject... So how do I "spread the word(le)?"  No need to linger on this question, so let's move on.



Twitter:  This is definitely a medium for communication that has taken over the world!  I have a facebook, but I've only logged onto it no more than 6 times in the past 2 years... I learned last Thursday that Twitter is different from myspace and facebook in that it is largely based on updated information of a person's interests (i.e. following famous people, the news, friends, businesses, etc.).  I can see myself being an obsessive tweeter, except I feel as though many people that have a twitter are more likely to have a fancy phone where a twitter application can be accessed through at all times of the day... and a fancy phone with internet access is something that Judy Tran has never had and cannot picture having.  When it comes to possibly using Twitter for my math classes, I can see it being useful for my students and I to be able to interact and ask/answer any questions pertaining to an assignment or project during out-of-school hours.  I find that I almost learn more when I do math in a group, because it's helpful to see different approaches to a math problem... so I can only imagine that creating a twitter page for my students would be just like having my entire class physically work together on problems and learn from one another.  However, there's still the situation with twitter-update-alerts in that I should not expect all of my students to possess what I consider a small, mobile computer (i.e. iphones and any other wireless devices that can fit in one's pocket).  What a world: we have little computers that can actually fit into our pockets.  I really hope I don't have to learn how to deal with a "Zoolander" phone (Exhibits A & B below) in my near future...

Exhibit A

Exhibit B



Inquiry-Based Learning

Last Thursday, I learned about inquiry-based learning through an activity that served as an example of how this type of learning could be integrated into my teaching practices.  I ended up loving it.  Frankly, I enjoy having exact directions on how to complete a specific assignment.  I don't feel that it traps me in a box... In my opinion, I was not only able to learn about the topic (rocks/minerals) which is one of our main goals as students, I was able to discover that I absolutely loved looking at the different rocks and minerals that nature presents to us.  Therefore, inquiry-based lesson plans give great step-by-step instructions, and although it asks us certain questions to answer, it still left room for creativity because that's what the internet allows us to have - CREATIVITY.  I actually ended up googling "the top 10 most beautiful rocks or minerals," and that's how I came about choosing my mineral, rhodochrosite -- because the internet allowed me to have the freedom to perform more tasks than what my assignment asked for, while keeping me on track with the topic and questions that I needed to answer.  Using the internet also allowed me to discover more pictures of my mineral than what the suggested webpage had already posted... So in the end, I was able to do more research on rocks/minerals using the internet than what a book could ever offer.  The funny thing is that I spent two hours looking at other websites that had rocks/minerals for sale, because I became so fascinated by its beauty... and I want to warn everyone that the prices for nature's beautiful accidents do not fit into our recession-budget, so go out there, dig, and dicover these treasures yourself:)

On another note, I feel that inquiry-based lesson plans are very similar to WebQuests... they both serve as a platform for teachers to create engaging activities that include very descriptive directions in order to achieve the ultimate goal: to facilitate the learning process through technological means.  If I were to have to state a difference, the only thing I can truly come up with is that WebQuests have more of a similar structure with one another when it comes to the makeup of the webpages than 'facilitation plans' do... but then again, many WebQuests are based off of  a "pre-set" webpage from a few websites like questgarden.com