It's the final countdown...

Last week's class consisted of lots and lots of tool time presentations. My favorite was poll everywhere that Karl presented. It looks like a fun tool that can be used as a very quick, informal assessment tool. I remember buying the clicker in college, but this is so much easier! I wonder if colleges are still requiring students to buy the clickers or if they have switched over to a tool that can be used with smart phones?

We also saw BeFunky from Danyl, which I've already been playing around on it with pictures of Shaggy!

Now that it's the weekend, I'm finishing up the loose ends and getting my portfolio together for our "Show and Share" at Scott's house for class on Monday! See everyone then!!

PSA: Lattice Abuse Resistance Education

I'm finally finished my PSA! Without further ado...

 

It's been a busy, busy week!

This past week was a busy one! We saw quite a few tooltime presentations Monday night. I look forward to trying to incorporate tools like flickr and storybird into my classroom. 

Wednesday was our Veteran's breakfast. It went well, we had many Veterans and Administrators with us to celebrate. My students were able to use my tagxedo project to create table numbers using words that represent how they felt about meeting these heroes:

 

 We had the kids recite poetry, the band played patriotic songs, and the vocal ensemble sang a few songs also. As I was taking pictures, this guy told me he better see this on the blog...

Thursday was our competition day where all the teams compete in academic and physical challenges. My favorites are the "Minute to Win It" games. Below, these students competed in the "Tissue Box Pull" game. The goal was to remove all the tissues from a box in under a minute. 

Friday was the Activity Day picnic, where any student who has participated in an extracurricular activity throughout the year gets to hang out at a park for the day with music and food and fun. There is always a teacher-student softball game- which is where I found Karl and Andrew:

I am relieved this busy week is over, now I can focus my attention on finishing up my last few projects for class. Happy Memorial Day!!

History of IT presentations

Last week we each presented our version of the History of IT. Karl, Vicky, and I presented the History of IT and the influences of the military. It can be found here. I found the one of the most interesting parts to be the use of training videos created by Walt Disney. Check it out:

This week, I've been focusing on completing more of my optional points. Oh right, and enjoying the sun in Duck, NC for a close friend's wedding. The Outer Banks is absolutely beautiful this time of the year. A few photos from the wedding:

I'm very close to completing my PSA. I can't wait to share it with everyone. I've also begun working on my time capsule. I'm creating a web-based capsule full of current tools for middle school mathematics instruction. I'm realizing I use many more tools than I realized!

Until next time, MAITies...

Class: May 9th

Tonight's class hosted our first two "tool time" presentations. Does anyone else picture Tim Taylor barking at Al Borland when you hear "tool time"? Maybe a little JTT action?? He WAS the Justin Bieber of my day, you know!

 

ANYWAY, back to the class. Jane and Colleen did a great job presenting Pro Prof Flashcards and Cacoo. I plan on trying out pro profs for an optional activity for my contract. I'm going to make flashcards for my unit on line relationships. Being able to include images will be very helpful with the geometric concepts.

Darlene, Danyl, and Jason were brave enough to present their History of IT project a week early. It was a fantastic presentation that set the bar high for the rest of us! They talked about history of edutainment. It was very interesting to follow the role of gaming through education. Who can forget Oregon Trail? A personal favorite of mine growing up was "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?"

I thought it was particularly interesting that it used to be a focus on "skill and drill" in education. The example usually given for this is multiplication table memorization. While it seems outdated, I often find as a math teacher that as we get away from this memorization tactic, our students tend to lose the ability to quickly recall basic math facts. 

Up Next for me: I'm starting to work on many of my optional points, including the flashcards and my PSA. I'm pretty excited about the PSA- I'm planning to finally take a stand against lattice multiplication. Stay tuned!

Mother's Day

Just a short post about Mother's Day. My mom was the one that convinced me to find a MAIT cohort (luckily it just so happened to be at Southern)! Her cohort will be finished in December- I'm only slightly jealous. :)

Since moving into our new house about a month ago, we try to host more dinners than we could in our old apartment, so we invited my mom and sister and sister's boyfriend over to celebrate Mother's Day.  We took some updated pictures, being that all my current family photos feature me in a big white gown:

 My mom, my sister and me

My hubby and me

Hi-ho, Hi-ho, it's back to work we go...

I was a little nervous to get back to class tonight. I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by all that we had to do, but it was all good once we were back. Karl and I had chosen to form a group for our History of IT project, but still needed a third. Luckily, Vicky was still looking for a group so we immediately joined forces.

Knowing that we were under a time crunch, we jumped right in and got our video tutorial observations, rubric, and some research completed. I'm really glad that I found a group that is as energetic and productive as I like to be. The best part? We have an extra week to complete our projects! phew!

We used bubbl.us to create our map of the video tutorials we watched. Karl also created a rubric in rubistar then exported it to excel for grading ourselves on our role for the project. Vicky was able to find a lot of great research on our topic, Instructional Technology and the Influence of the Military. Karl also remembered a New York Times article he read about technology in the middle east (his idea of light reading) that we're excited to share. (not just yet though!)

And in honor of the ASK test this week, I leave you with a few popular math jokes...

Our first class on Wimba

Because of Spring Break, we had an optional online class on Monday night on Wimba. This was our first real try at Wimba and it was pretty cool. I took this screen shot during the class.

Our first class

Tonight was our first class. We created avatars for ourselves using vokis. My avatar broadcasts my love of Ticonderoga pencils.