This semester, I took some time to get acquainted with some of the Edubloggers (Education Bloggers) out on the web. One of the blogs I came across, through the suggestion of a friend, is Chuck Baker's blog, which can be found here. Mr. Baker is a high school teacher, and one of his classes is AP Statistics, so he does a lot of great posts on that subject. He also does posts on other things math and otherwise school related as well. One of his blog posts that really struck me was called "The Next Step: Re-wrapping Within Your Instructional Context." In this blog, Mr. Baker talks about the struggle between teaching students the conceptual meanings of different math topics vs. teaching them the traditional procedures and leaving the conceptual knowledge up to next year's teacher. He also poses the question of whether or not we always need to situate our lessons in regards to our students' prior knowledge and the school environment.
This question really hit home with me, because it is something I have thought about in my placement. In our education classes at school, our teachers constantly harp on the fact that we need to relate topics back to students' prior knowledge. They grade us on whether or not we explicitly talk about students' prior knowledge in our teaching videos in math methods. While I often believe that this is beneficial to the students, and makes a "new topic" seem less daunting to them when it involves things they have already learned, Mr. Baker makes me question whether this is the best way to go about our teaching. If my students' prior knowledge indicates that I should be teaching them step-by-step procedures instead of allowing them to participate in inquiry-based learning experiences, should I listen to that prior knowledge? Unfortunately, I have to say no. While we should play off of students' prior knowledge whenever possible, I feel like sometimes we are doing so at the expense of our students. All students deserve to be taught the conceptual nature of math instead of just the procedural knowledge. Students may never need to understand how to factor a polynomial in their future job, but I guarantee they will benefit from the inquiry and problem solving skills gained when we approach the topic from a conceptual level instead.
Another blog I came across, thanks to my classmate Vi, is Jose Vilson's blog which you can find here. Jose writes a lot of thought provoking blog posts, especially about race and equality in the classroom. One post that I found particularly interesting was titled "I'm the M.E.T.H.O.D. Man (Classroom Questioning Tiger Style. In this post, Jose talks about the fact that asking questions just because they start with "how" or "why" doesn't necessarily mean we are asking meaningful and beneficial questions. He also gives some of his tips and tricks about how to get students to think for themselves instead of allowing them to frustrate you into giving them the answer. One of his pieces of advice is to take a breath and keep calm when you see students not thinking. At my placement, I have experienced numerous occasions where students simply aren't doing the work. They wait for you to give them the answer, or they don't even care to write down any answer at all. This frustrates me to no end, because my mentor teacher, the other student teacher in the classroom, and I are all willing to help them, and they simply aren't interested in receiving that help. I believe that Jose's advice will give me space to clear my head when this occurs, and hopefully put me in a better place to encourage the students to do the work and come to a solution on their own. Also, Jose responded to my comment almost immediately, and offered to answer any questions I might have in the future, so I think he is a good resource to keep on your list.
I am looking forward to reading future blog posts by both of these Edubloggers, and I encourage you to do the same!
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Flipping the Classroom
One day this semester, we had a guest speaker come in named Jon Palmer. Mr. Palmer is known for his "Flipping Physics" videos that he has created. Before coming into this program, I had never heard of flipped classrooms, and it was only this semester that I started to really understand how they work. In a flipped classroom, students actually learn the material at home, and then do their "homework" while they're in class. When they're at home, students might watch a video or a Powerpoint lecture, depending on how their teacher sets it up.
Mr. Palmer first started teaching in a traditional classroom. He then decided to videotape his classes, as a way of gathering information about his teaching. Eventually, he started creating videos that are now used in others' flipped physics classroom! His videos are highly entertaining, and often he goes out and completes real world tasks, such as riding a bike, to explain different concepts like acceleration. Mr. Palmer said that students usually have trouble understand how you can have a negative acceleration, and that actually showing them what this looks like by taking video of himself riding a bike, the students are much more apt to understand and remember the concept.
Mr. Palmer's lecture really got me thinking about what it takes to flip a classroom. I first thought about what a flipped classroom would look like in my current student teaching placement. My biggest concern would be access. While my students are very good at navigating their smart phones (especially during class) I don't know how many of them actually have internet access and computers at their homes. Many of them have spoken about the struggles that they have in their home lives, and the demographic of our school does not guarantee that students have luxuries such as computers. I know that Mr. Palmer and others have said that if they don't have computers, you can have the students watch the videos on their phones. However, I don't know that I believe the students would learn as much trying to watch a lecture on a screen that's only a couple inches big. Furthermore, I have no idea what number of my students have cell phones and data plans. I know that two students in the MAC program are in a flipped classroom together, and they said they pre-load lectures onto laptops for students to take home, so that they can watch them without internet access. I think this is a good idea, but I worry about the liability of allowing the students to take laptops home. Many of our students can't remember to bring a pencil to class, let alone be responsible for a laptop!
Then I started thinking about whether or not I would use a flipped classroom in the future. A lot of this, for me, would depend on my students. If I have students who consistently do their homework and who I trust would watch the videos each night and take notes, I would consider doing a flipped classroom. However, if the students don't watch the videos, then not only do you have to take the class time to explain the new material to them, but now you've wasted the time in which they're supposed to be doing their "homework" therefore you've just gone back to a traditional classroom setting. Also, if I were to flip my classroom, I would want to make sure that my video lectures were of a high quality, and were not just powerpoint slides thrown together. I know this would take a lot of time, so I would have to make sure I'm willing to dedicate that extra time to creating the videos and making it worthwhile for my students. Lastly, I am concerned about how school districts generally feel about flipped classrooms. Is this something you need to get permission about from administration? Does every school district allow it? Is there a lot of push back from parents? These are all questions that come to mind when I think about flipping my future classrooms. Overall, I like the idea of a flipped classroom, but I'm not sure that I believe the benefits of flipping my math class would outweigh the struggles I would run into by doing so.
Would you flip your classroom?
Mr. Palmer first started teaching in a traditional classroom. He then decided to videotape his classes, as a way of gathering information about his teaching. Eventually, he started creating videos that are now used in others' flipped physics classroom! His videos are highly entertaining, and often he goes out and completes real world tasks, such as riding a bike, to explain different concepts like acceleration. Mr. Palmer said that students usually have trouble understand how you can have a negative acceleration, and that actually showing them what this looks like by taking video of himself riding a bike, the students are much more apt to understand and remember the concept.
Mr. Palmer's lecture really got me thinking about what it takes to flip a classroom. I first thought about what a flipped classroom would look like in my current student teaching placement. My biggest concern would be access. While my students are very good at navigating their smart phones (especially during class) I don't know how many of them actually have internet access and computers at their homes. Many of them have spoken about the struggles that they have in their home lives, and the demographic of our school does not guarantee that students have luxuries such as computers. I know that Mr. Palmer and others have said that if they don't have computers, you can have the students watch the videos on their phones. However, I don't know that I believe the students would learn as much trying to watch a lecture on a screen that's only a couple inches big. Furthermore, I have no idea what number of my students have cell phones and data plans. I know that two students in the MAC program are in a flipped classroom together, and they said they pre-load lectures onto laptops for students to take home, so that they can watch them without internet access. I think this is a good idea, but I worry about the liability of allowing the students to take laptops home. Many of our students can't remember to bring a pencil to class, let alone be responsible for a laptop!
Then I started thinking about whether or not I would use a flipped classroom in the future. A lot of this, for me, would depend on my students. If I have students who consistently do their homework and who I trust would watch the videos each night and take notes, I would consider doing a flipped classroom. However, if the students don't watch the videos, then not only do you have to take the class time to explain the new material to them, but now you've wasted the time in which they're supposed to be doing their "homework" therefore you've just gone back to a traditional classroom setting. Also, if I were to flip my classroom, I would want to make sure that my video lectures were of a high quality, and were not just powerpoint slides thrown together. I know this would take a lot of time, so I would have to make sure I'm willing to dedicate that extra time to creating the videos and making it worthwhile for my students. Lastly, I am concerned about how school districts generally feel about flipped classrooms. Is this something you need to get permission about from administration? Does every school district allow it? Is there a lot of push back from parents? These are all questions that come to mind when I think about flipping my future classrooms. Overall, I like the idea of a flipped classroom, but I'm not sure that I believe the benefits of flipping my math class would outweigh the struggles I would run into by doing so.
Would you flip your classroom?
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Tech Tools in Use: Prezi
Over the semester, different groups from my class have been presenting on different tech tools and their uses in the classroom. One of my favorite presentations was about an awesome tool called Prezi. In my opinion, Prezi is an "exciting" version of PowerPoint. It zooms in and out, and flies all over the page, but still can hold the same information and pictures as PowerPoint can. I have used Prezi before for a couple presentations, but I had never really considered how it could be integrated into one of my future math classrooms.
One really cool thing that I learned from the presentation, which I had never even though about before, is that people publish their Prezis on the web for other people to use. If you search "Math classroom Prezi" or something to do with teaching math and Prezi you will get to see other Prezis that math teachers have made! Some of them are really great, and this is an awesome way to save time, or to have an extra tool to show when teaching on a certain topic.
One of my classmates, Jeni, was talking about how she would integrate Prezi into her science classroom by using it to show procedures on how to do labs. This inspired me to think of all of the different procedures that we teach in the math classroom. Could I make a Prezi about the process of solving a quadratic equation? Factoring a polynomial? Finding the x-intercepts on a calculator? Yes! And so much more. There are Prezi templates that are even set up in such a way that it's quick and easy to fill in the steps of your procedure and voila.
I think that creating Prezis on how to do different functions on a calculator would be incredibly beneficial, especially for the students in my current placement. They often have trouble remembering how to do different things on the graphing calculators, such as entering an equation, graphing it, looking at the table, and finding the intercepts. Handouts that list the steps of these procedures are good, but the students often lose them and aren't interested in reading through the steps. With a Prezi, though, we could keep them all in one location online, and include pictures that show exactly which buttons the students should be pressing. I think this would help them out, and I believe they would find it more interactive and enjoyable than the usual handout.
My only issue with using Prezis as resources for the students to go back and look at when they forget a procedure is the issue of access, again. If students don't have computers or internet at their houses then it's a little hard for them to log on and re-watch these presentations. I guess think is an issue I will have to think about further. I'm interested in looking more into how other teachers use Prezi in math classrooms and whether or not they have experienced issues with access inequities or not.
One really cool thing that I learned from the presentation, which I had never even though about before, is that people publish their Prezis on the web for other people to use. If you search "Math classroom Prezi" or something to do with teaching math and Prezi you will get to see other Prezis that math teachers have made! Some of them are really great, and this is an awesome way to save time, or to have an extra tool to show when teaching on a certain topic.
One of my classmates, Jeni, was talking about how she would integrate Prezi into her science classroom by using it to show procedures on how to do labs. This inspired me to think of all of the different procedures that we teach in the math classroom. Could I make a Prezi about the process of solving a quadratic equation? Factoring a polynomial? Finding the x-intercepts on a calculator? Yes! And so much more. There are Prezi templates that are even set up in such a way that it's quick and easy to fill in the steps of your procedure and voila.
I think that creating Prezis on how to do different functions on a calculator would be incredibly beneficial, especially for the students in my current placement. They often have trouble remembering how to do different things on the graphing calculators, such as entering an equation, graphing it, looking at the table, and finding the intercepts. Handouts that list the steps of these procedures are good, but the students often lose them and aren't interested in reading through the steps. With a Prezi, though, we could keep them all in one location online, and include pictures that show exactly which buttons the students should be pressing. I think this would help them out, and I believe they would find it more interactive and enjoyable than the usual handout.
My only issue with using Prezis as resources for the students to go back and look at when they forget a procedure is the issue of access, again. If students don't have computers or internet at their houses then it's a little hard for them to log on and re-watch these presentations. I guess think is an issue I will have to think about further. I'm interested in looking more into how other teachers use Prezi in math classrooms and whether or not they have experienced issues with access inequities or not.
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