As usual, I really enjoyed our 504 class on Friday, July 20th.
A former MAC student joined us to describe his use of video games in the
classroom. To teach parametric equations in his math class, he used Angry
Birds. He thoroughly explained his lesson, its successes and failures, and how
he plans to tweak it for next year. He mentioned that he felt his students were
drained after a long trigonometry unit. While there were some failures with his
lesson, it geared his students up for the rest of the year. I thought this was
an interesting application of video games in the classroom and made the ideas
presented in our readings more concrete.
He also described where he got this idea: twitter. I swore
to myself (and others) that I would never join twitter. I still haven’t, but
his presentation made me really think about it. He introduced us to the
tweet deck. This is an application on which you can join groups (his were
education and math groups) that can provide some great teaching ideas. He went
so far as to say that the tweet deck has saved his life a few times. How can
you argue with that? I guess we’ll see.
In the second part of class, we created websites for
ourselves that we can use as online portfolios. The website, Weebly, is
extremely user friendly and I think everyone’s websites looked great. K
mentioned that these portfolios could help us in our job searches and that we could
have our students use Weebly to create their own portfolios.
The amount of new technologies we have learned in only three
classes is amazing and I look forward to learning more!
Nice class reflection :) I also liked his use of angry birds to re-engage the students after they were drained from a long and difficult unit. It seemed like he came up with this lesson idea on pretty short notice, which I think might account for some of the failures in the lesson. I wonder, though, if a more "successful" lesson might have involved more mathematical intensity than the students were prepared for at that time. I liked that the lesson got the students active and out of the classroom for a day. (As a student, I always appreciated a change of scenery.)
ReplyDeleteI too have unofficially boycotted Twitter. His presentation did help to redeem Twitter to some small degree, but I am still not convinced about using Twitter as an educational tool.
I personally loved the weebly site. I thought it made website development extremely easy, and the overall structure of the site was very user-friendly. One thing I am hesitant about, however, is having students develop public, online profiles. We can get very comfortable with allowing our personal information to float around on the internet, and we forget some of the dangers associated with public access to some of our personal information. Do you have an opinion on this issue as it pertains to students developing a public presence on the internet? What dangers might be associated with this public presence?
Sarah, Kristin and I weren't sure whether or not to present twitter, but I think we have to come the fall. For all the bad rap that it gets (and not without reason) it offers a kind of "just in time" support network for teachers that can be really powerful. I'm glad that Tom shared it with us, especially since he was definitely a twitter skeptic at first.
ReplyDeleteHi Sarah! Great recap of class! I actually knew Tom from when I was an undergrad at UM through one of my roommates! I had no idea he was going into teaching! It was such a surprise to see his name on the agenda and then to later hear his "teacher voice" - very different from how I remember him! But that is just another reason why I know I've made the right choice in choosing the SecMac Program at UM - they prepare you to be a great teacher (I wonder if we are going to practice our "teacher voices" later in the year).
ReplyDeleteI also enjoyed learning about Weebly and believe it will be very useful for future interviews for jobs! "Oh, you want to see a video of me teaching, no problem, I'll just pull that up on my phone real quick!" Boom, hired.
I also felt the same opposition to Twitter at first. In fact, I had only joined Twitter about a year ago (late bloomer compared to the hipsters out there). I did it because enough of my friends had joined where it would actually be worthwhile to sign up and hear about their varying experiences since most of them had moved away. Also, I was bored and needed the distraction at my job. But now, I hope we get to learn more about Twitter and Tweatdeck. I had never thought of using these applications for education because I had always thought they were only for following entertainment personalities or for sports. My boyfriend follows any/all Tigers or Lions players/coaches to stay up to date on those particular team events/occurences. But that's the whole point of Twitter! TO stay up to date on items that are considered "newsworthy" to YOU! That's why I know it will be relevant to our lives as teachers and definitely suggest you get on it!!!