Week 5 - Report & Reflection

Welcome back alge-bros! (If you saw the pun in my post last week, you’d get that joke.)

In-class 
In-class this week we focused on blended learning, which is a combination of face-to-face and online learning, and technology integration. Individually, we participated in five stations to discover the basics of blended learning, several blended learning models, the popular SAMR model (as seen on the right), and the pedagogy wheel. Each station was online so all I needed was my laptop and headphones. Upon completion of the five stations, I met up with a few of my colleagues to record two 30-second videos using the mobile app Chatterpix about what we had just discovered.

 

Online 
Before class, we were asked to read a monograph entitled Making Math Children Will Love: Building Positive Mathitudes to Improve Student Achievement in Mathematics produced by the Ontario Ministry of Education. My thinking about teaching math changed when I read “Instead of trying to make children love the math they hate, make a math they’ll love.” This struck me as an ah-ha moment. I feel it is easier in younger grades to make a math that students will love because there are more concepts that can easily incorporate manipulatives and hands-on activities to establish the foundations of math. However, this quote made me think about the older grades and my upcoming placement. How can I make a math these students will love? I will not just give these students formulas for them to memorize and hope they know how to manipulate it in their favour. I want to know which apps I can use that will be the most productive for these students.

Carrington, A. (2001, Mar 15). The Padagogy Wheel V4.1
[Online Image]. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/2hTX8XW

Thankfully, the pedagogy wheel has that laid out for me. Based on the level of technology integrated into the classroom (Substitution-Augmentation-Modification-Redefinition) and on the learning goal for the students (create, apply, evaluate, understand, and analyze), this wheel lists a bunch of action verbs, activities and apps students can use to aid their learning. 

Blending it altogether 
Students these days are much more tech-savvy than I was when I was their age, mostly due to the accessibility of technology in their everyday classroom. I remember when we had a designated time every few weeks to go to the computer lab to work on our typing skills or play Math Circus. Combining these strengths in technology use with the need to support a wide variety of learning styles at the same time can be difficult but integrating technology into a math class is a simple solution. Choosing the right apps can engage students by providing new tools, different methods and most importantly, by allowing them to play. When students play, they have fun. They learn from each other which is more powerful than the teacher telling what math is. 

Therefore, my goal for my upcoming placement is to familiarize myself with apps that can be used in a math classroom, so that when the time comes, I will be ready to redefine students’ math learning.

Pun of the Post 
What did Jay-Z say when he got home from school? I got 99 problems and I have to show my work for all of them.