The Starting Line

So the start of the school year is right around the corner. Everyone, it seems, is looking ahead with high hopes of a successful year. I have begun outlining the school year and planning my lessons; the calendar already marks special days and holidays from September to June.  I always love the start of the school year because it is a clean slate for everyone. Students start fresh, with new teachers and new classes. No one has failed a test, forgotten an assignment or been absent from class.

For me, the first day of school often seems like a repeat of past years, with an opportunity to try new ideas and to improve on what I have done in the past; much like Phil Connors (Bill Murray) gets to do each same-day in the movie Groundhog Day. This year will be no different. I will wake up on the first day of school, with plans to improve my students understanding of Geometry, Calculus and Statistics. I will work hard to learn the best way to reach each of my students and hope to inspire their love of mathematics. Teaching is not always about the best lesson plans, it is about interactions between teachers and students.  In the New York Times Opinion post by David L. Kirp, Teaching is not a Business, Mr. Kirp supports this idea, "All youngsters need to believe that they have a stake in the future, a goal worth striving for, if they’re going to make it in school. They need a champion, someone who believes in them, and that’s where teachers enter the picture. The most effective approaches foster bonds of caring between teachers and their students."

With all of this in mind, looking ahead, one addition to my lessons, that I hope will deepen student understanding and improve in class discussions is an online tool called LessonPaths that I will try this year. Lesson Paths is a free web-based site that allows me to create an online lesson in a slideshow format. I can upload a Power Point Presentation, link, video, document, create a quick-check quiz, or write an article on each slide. Many pre-made lessons have been made public so  you can browse for a lesson you can use or from which you can gain ideas. There are some drawbacks to this tool, however. I have found that LessonPaths incorporates advertisements between slides in my lessons. While distracting, they are easy to skip over. I have created a few lessons that I plan to use as part the first homework assignment for my AP Statistics students in order to allow the class to focus on the skills of creating graphic displays and focus more on the analysis of the data during our class discussions. I am excited to see how this improves both graphing and analytical skills early in the year.

Is My Own Textbook Curation on the Horizon?

Back in October 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the OESIS conference in Boston.  It was a fascinating conference offering a variety of workshops that discussed technology use in the classroom. Keynote speaker, Tom Vander Ark, author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, mentioned curating your own textbook for a course. This was a new and intriguing idea for me, as the teachers in my math department are constantly looking for textbooks that adequately meet the goals of our courses. We supplement material often, either because the book we have is not challenging enough, does not cover a specific topic, or fails to provide adequate practice. Wouldn’t it make sense to put all of these supplemental resources in one place, accessible to students, and organized to meet the course objectives? I have thought, throughout the year, that this would be a great idea, but have been overwhelmed by the process, not quite sure where to begin.

I ran across the article, How to Easily Make your Own Textbook,  by Delores Gende in Edudemic, published in January 2012. In the article, she lists three steps in the development process, Aggregation, Curation and Creation. This process breakdown makes this daunting task seem more attainable. Looking ahead, this may be something I will try to do.

According to Gende, aggregation involves bookmarking information that would be used in your textbook is this first step.  I realized that I had been doing some form of this bookmarking using ScoopIt.com and Pinterest.com. I have been saving resources and articles of interest in these places for some time. Organizing my resources for textbook curation will be a new challenge. This will require me to analyze these recourses in line with my curriculum and teaching objectives. It will be important to provide interactive tools that allow my students to allow them to manipulate graphs and discover patterns. Sources for interactive tools that I will use include Geometer’s Sketchpad, Khan Academy and Applets on the Web. Finally, I will need to create the actual textbook in a place that my students can access the information easily. CK-12 provides great examples and free resources and pre-created Flexbooks to help teachers get started.

"We Touched the Future!"

One of the highlights of my spring semester was helping my geometry students understand scale-factor and similarity through design and creativity. To understand these concepts more deeply we embarked on a project to design dollhouse furniture to scale.  The students worked in small groups to plan the furniture that would go in their room. Using 123D-Design, the students developed a 3-D image of their piece of furniture. These digital creations were sent to the schools brand new MakerBot-3D printer where they came to life.  Throughout the week, the various pieces of furniture were added to the dollhouse, created by one of my students. Each day the girls looked forward to coming to class to see what new items were added. Once all of the pieces were completed, the dollhouse and its contents were given to the kindergarten class to play with in their classroom. As we left the kindergarten room, one of my high school students said, "I feel like we just touched the future. They will grow up to think 3D printers are just a common thing just like we have grown up with cellphones. My mom tells me stories about when cellphones were new. These girls will have a story about when 3D printers were new."

 "Why was this project important?", you may be asking.

1)  3D printing is rapidly growing and new uses for this technology are growing rapidly.  NASA is sending a 3D printer to the International Space Station in order to manufacture parts rather than waiting for deliveries.

2) Creativity is an important component in education. This project allowed students to be creative, exploring the features in 123D-Design that would allow them to get the results they desired. The opportunity to use the MakerBot printer and see their designs come to life motivated the students to be more creative. Sir Ken Robinson discusses the importance of creativity in his TED-Talk.

3) Making real-world connections helps students to learn and understand mathematics. NCTM President Linda Gojak stated, "Instructional programs from prekindergarten through grade 12 should enable all students to— 

• recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas;
• recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics."

This project supported these ideas as my student's reflection indicates, " When designing objects, it is crucial to use scale factor when designing. In architectural projects, conversion factors are used in online programs. This project allowed us to look into the eyes of an architect, which was very interesting!"

Looking Back: Canvas by Instructure

As this school year comes to a close, I find myself already thinking about what I did this year that was successful and how I will do things differently next year. The title of this blog, "Looking back and thinking ahead" reflects the constant effort to evaluate and improve on each lesson, trying to make mathematics clearer to my students. Technology continues to play a large role in my ever changing and improving classroom.  So what I am I looking back on this year? To begin with, my implementation of the school's newly adopted Learning Management System (LMS) for middle and upper school,  Canvas by Instructure.  Learning the new system was challenging, but in the long run I grew to love Canvas since it offers a flexible format that can be easily customized with discussions, polls, video comments, mathematical equations, and much more.  I chose to customize my site using the Pages option. The home screen provided links to important information my students needed. Looking ahead to next year,  I will continue to organize my Canvas site in this format, I plan to investigate more features of the LMS's features.