Here we go! Course 5 is underway and the time has come to begin our final project. It’s been a difficult decision about deciding what to do. The question that I’ve been asking since the beginning of this course is “How can we use technology to redefine learning?”. We have been learning and working towards this idea and I am hoping that this project will help me achieve my goal.
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Looking back on my previous blog posts, I noticed that I have attempted to use technology in various areas of the curriculum to move up the SAMR Model but I haven’t used it in math yet. When talking with Heather and Elaine, two ES/EC colleagues that are also a part of the COETAIL cohort at SSIS, they noticed the same. So we sat down and shared ideas about how we can use technology to redefine our math classrooms. We have had many discussions since then and have decided to work on our project together, differentiating for our given grade levels (Elaine: EC4, myself: G3 and Heather: G5). I am very excited to be working with and learning from my colleagues.
This is what we’ve come up with so far:
We feel that technology is becoming more present in most of our academic areas. Teachers across the school are using book-making apps, creating digital stories, writing blogs and making movies that showcase learning. We felt that math, however, was not being impacted by the use of technology. We, along with many other teachers in the school, also have felt that our math curriculum in general could use a boost. For these two reasons we are setting out to transform how math is taught. Dan Meyer’s “Teaching for Perplexity” video is a driving force behind our plan.
The plan is for each of us to come up with grade appropriate math problems (perplexity problems). These will be real world puzzles that students will need to solve. We will create videos of these problems to present to our students and post them on a wiki page. This wiki page will be designed in hopes that other teachers will use it as a resource for their own math teaching as well as a possible area for others to contribute their ideas/videos as well. This will create a more accessible professional resource for others to use. We will use a wiki page outside of SSIS in order for our project to have the capability of reaching a wider audience. Each grade will have a wiki page with a table broken into the different mathematical concepts. On the wiki pages, we will add links to google presentations for each three part problem. The presentation will lead students step by step and will have videos embedded within the slides. We also plan to share the process of how we made the videos with other educators in hopes that they will contribute to the site as well.
We will test the problems with our students and follow up with posts of the students trying out the problems. We will also ask students to reflect on what they did using videos/blogs. Explain Everything may be a possible app to use for explanation. We are also hoping to each have a group of students in our class that will be able to make a video with their own real life problem to be solved.
We hope that this will improve the transfer and connection between students’ math learning and real life. We hope that these perplexing problems will stimulate curiosity and drive in our students. The goal is to move math teaching and learning beyond ‘the math program’ with its textbooks and workbooks. Technology will help us to redefine traditional math practices. We hope that math will come alive for students as they interact with these math videos that share mathematical situations they can relate to in real life. Furthermore these problems will promote higher-level thinking as they involve critical thinking, evaluation, and synthesis to work through the problem and come up with a solution. As this project unfolds, the documentation of their process and reflections will further guide our redefinition of math initially in our classrooms, and hopefully in other classrooms as our wiki community grows.
I really enjoyed watching other COETAILers project 5 videos. It was amazing to see all of the wonderful ideas and possibilities that educators have come up with. Sharing ideas is a very powerful tool for redefining what we are doing in the classroom. The Grade 2 Non Fiction Writing unit was one that resonated with me. Having just recently written a similar unit for Grade 3, it gave me some alternate ideas and tools that I would like to try next year. Summarize and Synthesize in Grade 4 also provided me with some exciting ideas that I would like to try in my classroom. While the majority of my interest lies in the elementary units as far as implementing ideas into my classroom, I also enjoyed watching the other examples that were shared with us. It was helpful to see the various ways that COETAILers have presented their projects. I appreciate being able to have the freedom to choose what will work best for us to present our findings.