Fun Geometry Crossword

Winding Down

This is the fifth week of classes in my Technology class, and I gave my technology lesson presentation. I will update it to Taskstream once I have fleshed out the perpendicular lines portion.

I intended on being in front of the group for 5-10 minutes and instead I was teaching for 30 minutes plus. I liked that I had prepared the examples ahead of time in my notebook, but it did take a lot of time for that preparation. That was not inclusive of the time it took to write out my lesson plan. To use Smartboard in the future I will need to either make the notes more scaffolded so that I am not spending so much time on one class, or hopefully when I become more experienced, I will be able to be more efficient with setting up the presentation.

I really enjoyed on getting the students up to the board to work out the problems by themselves so that I could see their work to assess their understanding.

Screen cast Word - Textbox

Please check out this screencast on how to insert a textbox.

Wordle experiment

From the Edutopia article that I read, there are many things that I plan to use when I go into service as a teacher. The site, www.donorschoose.org, www.scrapaction.org, and www.freecycle.org are all great ways to get resources to the school, without dipping into funds that could be allocated elsewhere. I also could see myself using www.voicethread.com for students to make introductions for themselves, or even create a presentation of some sort.

I was most intrigued by www.wordle.net, hence there is a word cloud of my Ayers reflection hanging over my post. As a teacher, I would recommend the student use this tool to pull out potential vocabulary words that the student could then go back to and study. Also, if the student was writing a paper, he or she could use this resource to gain insight on his or her word choices, thereby making this a great tool for reflection. A student would be able to improve on their writing skills when a tool such as this brings it to light.

Some information on Down syndrome: webquest

Please take some time to review some important information on Down syndrome by way of managing through this webquest.

After you are done reading through the information on this webquest, you will need to click on here to respond to some content questions.

Testing out Screen Cast

As an example, I wanted to explain how to change some aspects of a cell format on Excel. Please click here to see what I have done.

After you have viewed this particular screencast, please help by completing the following survey.

My computer is like my third arm, or better yet, my second brain.

Before I even hit the snooze button to the alarm in the morning, my arm would reach out to my phone on the bedside table so that I could see how many Facebook notifications I received through the night. Could there be a distinction between information literate and information obsessed? I'll be the first to admit that I am information obsessed and in fact, I deactivated my Facebook account for the next twelve months for a very good cause.

I take the term information literate to mean that a person has the proximal and technical means to become informed about the world. This could still mean newspapers, magazines, and television news, although the accessibility to the personal computer for millions of people might make it a first choice. Instead of reading through my hard copies of Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Redbook, I can visit their web pages and meander through a series of clicks to become up to speed on the news and opinion pieces. I cherish the links to various news sources that I get via electronic mail from my father as I know he has accurate taste in what interests me. I often wonder, what did they do it the old days? Cut out the article from the periodical and set it aside or mail it? Another facet of literacy also means there is a motivation and a knowledge base of what is available and what is the best choice. With experience I know how to avoid the advertisements on the web and stick with the facts.

But sometimes advertisements, and facts for that matter, are not so easy to spot. I would like to assume that everyone has seen this photo by now. When I first saw it, many, many, many years ago, and I read some caption that illustrated the atrocities of this camel spider, and I had believed everything I read. The caption led me to believe that I was looking at one spider the size of that soldier's leg; I believed that the spider was venomous and it could jump several yards in one bound.

Now, I know better. In fact, this turned out to be a real life lesson for me: "Do not believe everything you read on the internet."

Unfortunately, there is more erroneous information on the internet then one person could probably read in a lifetime. One could get really confused if he did not know how to go about weeding through the information that was false. Just look at the franchises such as "Mythbusters" on Discovery Channel and websites such as Snopes.com that are dedicated to debunking false claims and urban legends.

If I was to review some information on my own I would first go with my gut. If something did not seem right, then it very well may not be. To take it to the next step I would cross reference the same subject to see if I could find additional websites or sources to support the information. A good recommendation by Alan November (n.d.), was to run the author's name through a search engine and see what various agencies link back to the author. For example, if the general consensus is that the author is promoting hate speech, then that would be a source to be cautious of.

This task can be extremely daunting these days. In fact, one primary source of information, Wikipedia.org, can be misleading. This online encyclopedia can be a collaboration of everyone and their mother. How can someone tell if an article on this website is real information or not? Luckily, Wikipedia has some helpful guidelines as well. Click here to learn more: How to evaluate a Wikipedia article These guidelines suggest many tools. One thing I had never thought of was to check the age of the article since an older article would have had more visitors, hence,more opportunities to be challenged.

Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?

"To find out, a Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment in hundreds of classrooms in multiple cities. He used mostly private money to pay 18,000 kids a total of $6.3 million and brought in a team of researchers to help him analyze the effects. He got death threats, but he carried on. The results, which he shared exclusively with TIME, represent the largest study of financial incentives in the classroom — and one of the more rigorous studies ever on anything in education policy"

Read the entire article by clicking on the title below

Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?

Does anyone want to share their opinion on this? I find it interesting that the results can conclude that bribery is somewhat successful in transforming into intrinsic motivation when implemented with the second graders.

Should students be taught algorithms?

I found this really interesting video that I thought I would share. I read that some schools wish to take algorithms out of school instruction and "teach" students how to do multiplication and division by "reasoning through." Hmm, is this real learning going on? And as my methods instructor, Cory Maley said, "without learning, there is no real teaching." I enjoyed learning algorithms, why do educators want to take them away?

My first day of school

Tuesday was the first day on my adventure to become certified to teach math in Connecticut. My first class was Learning with Technology with instructor Bob Hale. I also got to meet everyone in my group. We will be spending 6 hours a day/ 4 days a week with each other for the next 12 weeks so I am glad that everyone is really nice. Yippee!!

Initially I had used my prior blogger profile and I had created a previous blog for this purpose on Tuesday, but after much thought, I decided to create a separate blogger identity. The main reason for this was because I wanted to have a profile on this education blog, but I wanted it to have a more professional tone then the profile I have on the blog I keep for my daughter. It didn't seem possible to have more than one profile under one blogger identity. So I started this new format today.

I inserted some html code to have a more creative background. I did this by searching the free backgrounds available on The Cutest Blog On The Block website. If anyone else is interested, as there are equine backgrounds, Irish backgrounds, and beach backgrounds to name a few, you can click here for that website.

I do want to start out by including the link to for direction to the course information.