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 While it seems outdated, I often find as a math teacher that as we get away from this memorization tactic, our students tend to lose the ability to quickly recall basic math facts.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!