Electronic Attendance

     I am currently doing my fieldwork at Kearny High School and the high school takes attendance of the students electronically. They do this by having the students scan into school with their student ids. The teachers also have to take attendance in each of their classes and submit it through a program called Genesis. Doing this keeps track of the students who cut class. They can check this because if a student is signed into school but not in class means they cut class. Online attendance cuts down on the amount of class cutting because the students know they will easily get caught through the online attendance program. It also helps monitor who is in the building at all times in case of an emergency.  

             I think that this system works well and it should be implemented in more schools because it is quick and effective. No longer does someone have to walk around and collect the attendance from each room in the morning and manually record the absences in a computer. It is also beneficial because it automatically keeps track of how many days a student is absent or tardy to school. They can keep track of this and try to stop to many absences if it becomes an issue for a student. 

     Having students scan into school also reinforces that they need to be on time. No longer can students sneak in after the bell rings and get away with it. Since they have to scan in everyday the scanner clocks what time they got to school. They cannot come to school late and get away with it because the scanner will point it out right away. In the past a students first period teacher might let them get away with being late to school, but the scanner will not. 

     I have never seen another school using an attendance system like this. All the schools that I have been to and substituted in still use paper attendance. Has anyone else seen an attendance system like this? I would love to hear your comments and if you agree or disagree with taking attendance in this fashion. 

Online Grade Books

     Online grade books are becoming much more common in schools today. Some teachers like to use online grade books because it easily calculates grades, class averages, and much more. Using paper grade books requires you to calculate manually every average which can allow for error. Teachers who do not like using online grade books say it’s because they are not good with technology or they do not trust that it will properly save. They are nervous about the risk of losing all the grades. 

     I think that online grade books are a positive piece of technology in schools because it saves teachers a lot of time because they no longer have to calculate grades by hand. The system does it all for you, all you have to do it input the grades that you want to be averages with the corresponding percentage. This system also is always correct, and makes no mathematical errors, which can easily happen when teachers make the calculations by hands. 

     Online grade books also can make graphs of the class averages to show students where they stand compared to the average of the class. They will be able to observe if they are doing above average, average, or below average. This will allow students to assess their work so far and improve if needed. If they are below the class average they will know to work harder and get extra help if they feel they need it. Paper grade books do not do any of these things for the teacher. If a teacher wanted to show this from her paper grade book she would have to create the graph by hand. Online grade books are also beneficial because once a grade is entered the guidance counselor can pull up a student and see all the grades. This is a good thing because if there is a problem with that student they can call the student down and ask what is going on. Overall, I think that online grade books are a great thing that a school can offer. 

Learning through Power Point

          I was never a huge fan of power point presentations. I felt like they were boring and many teachers just read off the slides. I do not feel like power points are a good use of technology in a math class, because math is interactive and you need to do many examples on paper. This is something that you cannot do with a powerpoint. A powerpoint presentation is used more for factual lessons, not interactive lessons. I do not feel that power point is appropriate in math. 

I do not think powerpoint can never be used in other subjects such as english or history. In english and history there are many more facts and opinions being presented where power points can do the job. Teachers can use power points to organize there lesson into different slides and teach one or two facts at a time. This allows students to focus on one slide at a time and not become overwhelmed of a whole page of information at once. 

In math classes teachers can use interactive websites, typed up outlines of text and examples where they can write in the work on the board, or they can use handed out worksheets for the students to work in groups with any tools they need to figure out a problem. To me these are better options to get learning to take place in a math class than using power point presentations. When I was a student and I had to learn from power point presentations I was always bored and usually did not pay attenuation because the teachers always scrolled throughout the slides to fast and I couldn’t get all the notes down, and they were lecture based not student based. 

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