Second to last math class and I am still learning a lot!
When thinking about what to teach your students these four steps can be used as a framework:
1.What do they know- The teacher needs to figure out what they know because if you just reteach what they know then they wont be learning anything
2.What do I want them to know- The teacher needs to decide on the objectives of the lesson to ensure the lesson has a focus
3. How do I get them there- The teacher needs to decide what is the most appropriate way for the students to obtain the objectives and take in to account their individual needs
4. Did they get there- In the end, and along the way, the teacher should decide if the students have learned what they needed to learn
If those four steps are used as a framework, your students will have the best opportunity to learn what they need and what you want them to. Instead of holding on to a lesson plan because you like it, or spent a lot of time on it, you need to step back and evaluate why you are teaching what you are teaching.
We learned of a great website today in class, Wolframalpha. When I was in school I always wished a website like this existed. This website is helpful for all of the even numbered problems in a textbook, you know the ones that don't have the answers in the back of the book. What you do is plug in the equation you need solved and it solves it for you. Or if you are just trying to divide two fractions, it will also solve that for you. Quite impressive. Now the question becomes, how does this change what we as teachers do? It is no longer enough to say that the students need to compute all of the problems because they can just use the Internet to do the work for them. How do we ensure that they are learning, because if they have been using Wolframalpha to do their homework, what does that mean for the tests.
Another thought to how technology changes things is what if the homework was no longer doing the math problems at home, but it was having students watch a video on how to do the math that the teacher created. Instead the lesson is introduced at home and then worked through at school. No longer your traditional teaching. Would that work? What would be the negatives, or the positives to doing this?
I really appreciate the math activity we did in class today. Not only did we get to experiment with measurement in an atypical way, using anything as a measuring device, but then we figured out that it was a linear relationship. I think this lesson could be simple used as an introduction to linear relationships and what it means to have a linear relationship. We did not really need any background knowledge to complete this lesson. It could get the conversation started, as it did in our class, about linear relationship. I also liked how this activity tied into the the math video we watched. The students in that video were also learning about linear relationships in a different way. There are so many great ways to teach the same material. However, I think that these two examples are two different ways to get across the same information. It would be interesting to have students do one, and then the other and talk about why they both show linear relationships. It would help strengthen the students understanding of such relationships.
Helpful tip for a new teacher: If you need something ask around. Its possible that you might just find what you need in some storage closet. So look to see what treasures are lost at the school. Additionally if someone offers you something they no longer need, take it. You might just end up needing it. But if you don't need it, take it anyways because that person will keep coming back to you with things they don't need and you might just end up getting something great.
When thinking about what to teach your students these four steps can be used as a framework:
1.What do they know- The teacher needs to figure out what they know because if you just reteach what they know then they wont be learning anything
2.What do I want them to know- The teacher needs to decide on the objectives of the lesson to ensure the lesson has a focus
3. How do I get them there- The teacher needs to decide what is the most appropriate way for the students to obtain the objectives and take in to account their individual needs
4. Did they get there- In the end, and along the way, the teacher should decide if the students have learned what they needed to learn
If those four steps are used as a framework, your students will have the best opportunity to learn what they need and what you want them to. Instead of holding on to a lesson plan because you like it, or spent a lot of time on it, you need to step back and evaluate why you are teaching what you are teaching.
We learned of a great website today in class, Wolframalpha. When I was in school I always wished a website like this existed. This website is helpful for all of the even numbered problems in a textbook, you know the ones that don't have the answers in the back of the book. What you do is plug in the equation you need solved and it solves it for you. Or if you are just trying to divide two fractions, it will also solve that for you. Quite impressive. Now the question becomes, how does this change what we as teachers do? It is no longer enough to say that the students need to compute all of the problems because they can just use the Internet to do the work for them. How do we ensure that they are learning, because if they have been using Wolframalpha to do their homework, what does that mean for the tests.
Another thought to how technology changes things is what if the homework was no longer doing the math problems at home, but it was having students watch a video on how to do the math that the teacher created. Instead the lesson is introduced at home and then worked through at school. No longer your traditional teaching. Would that work? What would be the negatives, or the positives to doing this?
I really appreciate the math activity we did in class today. Not only did we get to experiment with measurement in an atypical way, using anything as a measuring device, but then we figured out that it was a linear relationship. I think this lesson could be simple used as an introduction to linear relationships and what it means to have a linear relationship. We did not really need any background knowledge to complete this lesson. It could get the conversation started, as it did in our class, about linear relationship. I also liked how this activity tied into the the math video we watched. The students in that video were also learning about linear relationships in a different way. There are so many great ways to teach the same material. However, I think that these two examples are two different ways to get across the same information. It would be interesting to have students do one, and then the other and talk about why they both show linear relationships. It would help strengthen the students understanding of such relationships.
Helpful tip for a new teacher: If you need something ask around. Its possible that you might just find what you need in some storage closet. So look to see what treasures are lost at the school. Additionally if someone offers you something they no longer need, take it. You might just end up needing it. But if you don't need it, take it anyways because that person will keep coming back to you with things they don't need and you might just end up getting something great.
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