Project Update

I am in the middle of implementing my project, and everything is going pretty good. The main problem that is arising is that I am waiting until the last possible time to implement my project, but due to the schedule of the course this was my only option. We are really finished with the actual lesson implementation, and now we just have to wait for the project showcase and presentations. The project showcase will be December 2nd and then I will be able to complete the unit. Yesterday I was able to view some of the videos and work with the students on enhancing their videos during class. I lead them through some basics of Movie Maker and was pleased at their involvement in the lesson.
I feel good about where I am at, although I am pushing this close to the end of the semester.

How close are we to 1:1 learning?

I teach in the largest growing school system in the southeast, and the largest school system in the state of GA. If Gwinnett County Public Schools went to 1:1 learning it would be a huge for the industry and a major breakthrough in the field. However, I have not heard any new developments in this area. The system has just over the last few years implemented a laptop initiate for all the teachers and personnel in the system. I imagine that the county will evaluate how this has worked and see what it leads to in the future.
My opinion would be that due to the size of the school system, that we might be waiting for other school systems to try to implement this. Or it might be that they will try to implement this at one level (elementary, middle, or high school and then see how it goes. The school system is in the process of retrofitting all of the schools and updating the technology. This is a process that started a couple of years ago and should be finished by next year. This process includes installing projectors and interactive white boards in every school, and the vision is that all classrooms will have them in place. With these projects as well as just trying to keep up with building new schools, I think that our system is at least 5-10 years away from a 1:1 learning experience.

Take Away from Digital Citizenship

This was a cool opportunity to see different ways that we can handle and implement technology. I especially feel compelled to share some of the knowledge in the presentations to colleagues and parents at my school. We are usually kept informed about professionalism in regards to dealing with every aspect of our teaching field except for the new wave of technology. Whether it is plagiarism, social networks, web filtering, or other aspects in need of some digital citizenship, everyone in education needs to pay attention to this important feature. There are so many new tools and opportunities to use technology in the education field, we must look for ways to stay safe as we use these applications and tools. This activity was very important and I left feeling that I could present to teachers or parents in regard to an issue like this. Overall, this was pretty cool.

Most Useful Resource

I really liked the assignment of finding resources and there were some really great things that I found. Some of the most helpful resources were the individual activities that I found while searching the texas instruments website, united streaming, and the apple learning interchange. However the most useful resource was the yteach.co.uk Although this is not a totally free resource, these are some of the best online tutorials that I have been able to find. There are great student interactions and it is one of the best ways for students to get caught up in the content. Even though there is a pay factor, it is great that the site allows you to preview all of the interactions so students can practice on the tutorials before purchasing. When allowing a few students to try out some of the tutorials, they truly enjoyed working with the content. I am looking into seeing if my department would like to purchase a couple of the units/tutorials.

What is on my mind?

Well after the honeymoon and coming back to reality, there is a lot of things on my mind.... But as far as this class and project is going, there are a couple of things going on. I am really ready to begin devoting more time to this project and create some interesting activities to use. I have 2.5 weeks until i have to have my project ready. I still am not quite sure of how I could create a real-world problem surrounding my project, but I really want an authentic context for students to apply trigonometric concepts in. Once I have my preplan comments back, I feel that I can really get into my project and produce some great changes to my plan and develop something great.

Creativity and My Project

Thinking about how to incorporate creativity within my project is a complex topic. For upper level mathematical problem solving and application there is a lot of creativity needed. However, I think to satisfy the LOTi standards a much more indepth approach to gaining creative thinking is needed. I will begin looking for ways to incorporate this when i get back from my honeymoon. So this will be the last post for a while, and I will be back on 10/12

Thoughts/Concerns on Assessing Student Learning

As I prepare to lead students through a project based learning approach, the assessment of this unit is very important. It is usually easy to assess basic knowledge but since my learning goals are going to be more complex, different assessment methods must be used. As the students are working on their project, I would like to periodically assess their knowledge. For this I think I will require each team to meet with me twice during the lesson to explain the process of their project. As far as assessing the content knowledge and skills in the lesson, I think I am going to pair up each team and allow the teams to assess the other teams skills. Each team will produce a quiz over the content and give it to the other teams members. This will be an individual assignment, but the teams will score the quizzes and give each other feedback.

For the overall project assessment I will use a rubric, but I would like to use some different features of the rubric. I would like for my students to be able to apply the trigonometry content into real life situations. So, I would like for my rubric to have some sort of component where it would allow me to truly asses their ability to apply the content to other situations.