Learning Through Video

There are many mathematical videos on the internet that teach various mathematics concepts. Do you think videos should be used in the math classroom to teach or reenforce a concept or skill?

I think that using videos in a math setting is a good way to show students different examples of how to solve or do something. For some reason as soon as you say you are going to show a video it grabs the students attention right away. This is a good way to teach a concept or introduce a new concept and have all your students paying attention. You can also show a video to help your students learn a long formula like the quadratic equation through a song. My high school math teacher showed us a video of the quadratic equation when I was a freshman in high school and to this day I still remember it. So as you can see videos are very effective in a math classroom because they help the students to remember formulas or learn concepts in a way that relates to them. 

Students love the use of technology because that is their life style so anyway you can incorporate technology into a lesson such as video is a good thing. Not all teaching should be done through video but if there is a video that you think would be useful to your students learning, showing it in class would be a good idea. 

Another way to incorporate video into your students learning is by giving them a list of videos to watch on their own time, if they need more examples of a concept. They will be able to watch these videos at home when they are working on their homework if they forget how to do something. I do not see any negatives to incorporating videos into your lessons.   

Collaboration Canvas

Remixing another classmates canvas was very fun and creative. I had a hard time finding a canvas to remix that would go well with my original unit. I used an art canvas to remix and I was creative with what I choose to do. I am having my students create a piece of art only containing congruent triangles. The art also must be of trees in nature and it has to show the effect trees play in art. 

I added videos and pictures to show students how to contract congruent triangles by hand using a compass. I also added pictured and videos to show students how to contrast a basic tree out of triangles. Those videos were just a simple tree, their art works will be more complex.  

I had some difficultly finding art pieces that also contained math, but I did my best to make it work. I had a fun time with this project and I think that it is a great way to show us how to use different subjects in one class. Mixing more than one subject into the same class will be beneficial to the students because they will be able to see how math can be used in other areas of their study as well

Canvas:
http://www.play.annenberginnovationlab.org/play2.0/challenge.php?idChallenge=2755&mode=view#network6

Online Homework

Online homework has its positives and negatives to it. One positive is that it saves time for the teacher when grading homework. Online homework programs grade the students homework electronically and the teachers can put the results directly into their grade book. The teachers will have the ability to see who truly completed the homework before the class starts. This will allow the teacher to know who completing their work at home before school starts. Online homework also saves the teacher time in the classroom because she does not have to walk around and check who did their homework and then collect it if she pleases. 

Online homework can also be bad, this is because it is very easy for students to guess the correct answer or cheat on it to get a good grade. One way this can be done is looking at the examples that are given with the question and the students just plugging in their numbers instead of the numbers in the example. This is not good because the students are not truly trying to solve the problems on their own for practice. Another way you can cheat on the online homework is by putting the wrong answer in on purpose so that the computer gives you the correct answer. Lastly many of the web-assign questions can be found on google, where students can easily look up the correct answer. Unlike written homework there is no work to prove that the child did the correct computations to solve the problem on their own. 

Another negative of online homework is input issues. Many times the student will have the correct answer but type it in differently than the computer wanted and it will be wrong. This will give that student the idea that he is solving the problem wrong when he may be right. 

I am not 100% against online homework but if I was to use it in my classroom I would ask my students to bring in their work on a separate piece of paper to hand into me so that I can make sure my students are really doing the work and that they are doing it correctly. 

Unit Plan Canvas

At first, when I looked at this assignment I was a little nervous because I had never used PLAYground before and I was unsure what to expect. Once I started this assignment I quickly saw that this site was easy to use, since everything that was needed was right there. Creating this canvas was very fun for me. I liked how it is set up and I think that students would really benefit from it. They can use it to see an overview of the unit, and use it as a reference if they need some extra help. On my canvas I tried to include examples of each topic weather it was through video, pictures, or links to websites. This canvas is also a great way to share ideas with other teachers, they will be able to go to your canvas and see what you are doing for certain topics and you can easily go to other canvas yourself to get more ideas for teaching. 

I choose this topic of congruence because it is often a difficult topic for many students. For IA #3 I choose a high school geometry problem that is similar to my canvas. I wanted to do more on congruence and proofs because many students find this difficult and I wanted to create a canvas for my students to reference to get the extra help they may need. I posted many examples and a video for my students to view if they are having difficultly on this topic. 

http://www.play.annenberginnovationlab.org/play2.0/challenge.php?idChallenge=2446&mode=view#network6