I love educational technology...NOT!

Educational Technology has actually been a great class, but it has had it's ups and downs. We've done many projects in Ed Tech (about 1 per week!) and some have been easier than others to say the least. Things like making a name tag for our door and writing a paper were quite easy, but the two things that stand out the most to me are the Excel project and our bulletin board.

The Excel project was the one project that has challenged me the most. Like many of my peers, I have not had a lot of experience with Excel, therefore, I was not only teaching my "students" to use it, but myself. In the original process, I had a friend of mine that attends the University of Oklahoma help me with it over Skype. Then, once I turned the project in, I still had a few things missing, such as using the "summation" button. Dr. Osborne graciously told me what I was missing and allowed me to do it. Through this project, I can clearly say I learned a lot. Not only did I learn how to work Excel and create a good worksheet, but that its okay to have students redo things for credit if they are clearly making an effort and learning from their mistakes.

The bulletin board project also provided a challenge, because my group was not sure what to do with out topic. Learning about evaluation can be kind of hard to depict in a fun interactive way, but I feel that we were succesful and ended up making an adorable bulletin board.

The final project that I would like to address is the Webquest. We just started it a few days ago, so there is not tons to be said about it, but I am nervous about this project. It is something new for me. I think I have come up with a good topic and question now, but I'm not sure about little details and how it is all going to come together. I think I will learn a lot once again and that this project will be similar to the Excel project.

Using Blogs

When initially thinking of blogs and math, not much comes to mind beyond the bits involved for computer programming that you learn in math classes such as Linear Algebra and Discrete Math. Since, more than likely, I will not be using matrices or anything else of that matter, I think I should probably move on from those thoughts.

I do think this blog could serve as a highly effective tool. Students and their parents can see it. As a teacher, I could list daily homework assignments, extra practice work, and happenings within the modern math world for the brave students that would like to dive into it. I could also post real life applications for the math currently being worked on in class and thought provoking questions that correlate with it. Finally, this could function similarly to a newsletter and guarantee me that parents will be able to get it and students will not lose it.

Additionally, here are some other math teachers that have blogs:

http://letsplaymath.wordpress.com/
This blog is for math teachers and anyone interested in math. It has great ideas for math games and incorporating fun into learning math.

http://wildaboutmath.com/
This blog has math challenges on it and you can email in your answers. Then a winner is chosen at random (from the correctly answered on time responses) and they may receive various types of prizes.

I think that both of these could be great ways to incorporate a blog into my class. The first one is more helpful with my own personal lesson plans. The second one made me think that I could place challenges on here and give some extra credit points or prizes for correctly answerings the challenges.