Blogarithm of a Learner

I found a website called the Art of Problem Solving in my Google Reader.  This site has many math word problems on different levels categorized by subject.  The site tracks students’ success rates and offers problems based on their success.  As a teacher, I can create class lists and keep track of each student’s progress.  I plan to use this site as an enrichment tool for my students.  Many of them enjoy problem solving and this is a great tool for differentiating for each student.

I found many videos that show a teacher’s strategy for teaching a particular concept to his/her students.  The two videos I focused on were created by Susan Johnsey.  The two videos are part 1 and part 2 of teaching students how to add and subtract integers.  Her method is not one I have seen before and I wanted to see what I could learn from her and if I wanted to incorporate some of her ideas into my teaching.  Here is her Part 1 video:

As far as a “how to” video, I am interested in learning how to draw.  There are many videos on this subject.  I will probably need to watch them all several times to have the possibility of catching on (too many numbers in my head)!

For fun, I looked up “dancing babies”.  Don;t know why exactly, but they did make me laugh and it is always good to laugh!

An obvious way to use video to support my learning is to find other teachers like Susan Johnsey that have created videos showing how they teach concepts to their students.  I am only in my third year of teaching pre-algebra to 7th graders, so I am still learning the most effective ways to present ideas to them.

Somewhere during this course I came upon a math teacher’s blog where he had created videos to use with his students in their study of graphing.  So I think another great way to use video in my class is to vido “real life” situations that relate to what we are studying.

I love the concept of google docs.  I have already used this some at work.  We use a document each time we have a team meeting.  Each teacher that is a part of the meeting adds things to the agenda that he/she thinks we need to talk about.  It works really well.

An idea I have for may classroom is to have each student record their math journal in a Google document and share it with me and their classmates. We can work together as a class to create best responses/thoughts/ideas in our math journals.

This past spring I used Google forms to create integer mastery quizzes for my students.  They took the quiz online and I could give them immediate feedback on how they did.  I liked the fact that I could set up the quizzes so that they were computer graded.  In my class, my students do a skills review of five problems almost every day.  I am working to set these up in Google Forms to have my students put their solutions online.

I think there are endless possibilities for the use of Google Docs.

My initial thought about podcasting is that is not going to be at the top of my list to use in my classroom.  I am sure there are ways for me to use this as a teacher, but nothing immediately jumps out at me.  At this point in our Web 2.0 course, I have learned about so many new things and I have many new ideas that I am more interested in working on than figuring out how to use podcasting.  I did download two podcasts – for personal use I downloaded “Running to the Beat”.  For professioanl use, I downloaded TedTalks.   I

I found LibraryThing interesting, but not something I would currently use in the classroom.  I may try using it for my own personal reading – to find books that I would enjoy.  As well, I plan to explore it more and see if I can find books on education that I would use professionally.

I was excited at the beginning of the course when I noticed that Thing 15 was about organizing bookmarks.  I have lots of bookmarks and have been looking for a way to keep them straight.  I love the tags.  As soon as I signed up for Delicious I imported my bookmarks (I didn’t know this was the stretchier task) and I am working to get all of them tagged.  Most of my bookmarks have to do with my teaching – some sites are lesson plans, some are printable resources, some are online activities, etc.  Delicious will help me organize my sites and hopefully save me time and effort when I am looking for ideas for my classes.

I tagged one of my bookmarks with k12learning20, but it is not listed on the wikipage, so I am not sure if I have done it correctly.

Here is a link to my delicious links:

http://del.icio.us/jrorabaugh

I found a link to some Math Challenge Posters that I really like.  Many of my 7th grade math students love math puzzles and there were quite a few good problems in this group of posters.  I am excited about having them in my classroom this fall.

I looked at several tools, but ended up focusing on quizlet and bubbl.us.  I chose to look at these because I thought they would have practical applications for my classroom.  As soon as I explored quizlet, I used it to create a vocabulary list for my summer math workshop students that I will be teaching next week.  I plan to use it to create a vocabulary list for each of my units.  Actually, I plan to show my students quizlet and teach them to make vocabulary lists.

I was drawn to bubbl.us because I have just recently learned about mind-mapping and think it would work well for me.  I found expensive software for mindmapping that looked really cool, but was out of my price range.  I am excited to find bubbl.us for free!  I want to use bubbl.us to map out my units of teaching, my ideas for student notebooks (or e-notebooks?), my ideas for integrating Web 2.0 in my classroom, etc.

Image by Network Osaka

Okay, if you can’t tell, my topic for my search on flickr was “mathematics”.  I wanted to find photos that I thought would appeal to my students – with color, design, humor, etc.

Before this task, I knew nothing about flickr.  What a great site!  It is very cool to have so many pictures available to view and/or use.  Currently I am teaching pre-algebra to 7th graders.  Part of the pre-algebra curriculum is a unit on geometry. One idea I have for using flickr is to have students create a collection/collage of photos showing different geometric shapes.

A second idea I have is to use flickr to help me find photos of things that relate to whatever concept we are studying at the time.  I would like to be able to find photos that connect whatever we are studying to things outside the classroom.