After I attended our first class session, then had a week off- I have had a lot of time to ponder how each of my classes will affect my classroom. During our first class I thought, “I don’t think there is any way that this class will apply to my content area (math).” But over the last two weeks I thought about the different types of instructional media and how I might be able to apply them to teaching math in the near future. The first thing I thought about was using different types of media to reach the different interests of my students (differentiation). I came up with a short list of ideas that may be useful in my future classroom.
· Have the students use excel to solve problems involving statistics
· Show how to properly use the functions on a graphing calculator
· Use overhead projections of graphs and other models to display different ways a problem could be solved.
· Use the program Maple to display graphical data. (One of my math professors used this program in my Calculus III and it made the problems come alive, and more interesting).
· Have the students take a problem that is in their field of interest (business, sports, finance, biology, physics, cosmetology, drama…) and create some sort of math problem they would use in their field- create an example and solution. Present to other members of the class through a classroom blog. For example a student interested in cosmetology may want to run their own business some day, they could calculate how many clients they would have to have and what their prices should be in order to generate a profit.
· Watch a documentary/biography on people who use math in their career every day.
· Use a SmartBoard. Let students write on it- teach their peers how they did a problem.
· Play interactive math games online or software games.
· http://www.coolmath.com has interactive games for classes including pre-calculus, geometry, algebra, and pre-algebra.
· http://www.math-videos-online.com/index.html is a website full of educational videos.
I also read this great article about a study done to math teachers about using instructional media. It has great suggestions for me as a future teacher. I really liked how in the conclusion it states some of the things that make using technology difficult and ways to overcome those difficulties. This is the link to that article http://www.ait.net/technos/e-zine/articles/math_teachers.php. I’m excited to have my own classroom someday and utilize the things that I have learned in this class.
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