Ineffective use of Technology

When I saw this cartoon, it made me think of how many of these presentations I have seen used ineffectively!


Taken from:
http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/tfd-archives/tfdarchive-mar08.php

My RADical day

Here is a lame little activity that I came up with last week in the shower. It is called "My RADical day" (Alternately, my PI day) designed for the Pure Math 30 Trigonometry unit.

In this unit, students are required to play around with radians <-> degree conversions. A fun (cross-curricular!)way to do this is to get students to create a little story about their "RADical" day.

Here is the gist of the assignment.

(reminder 360 degrees = 2pi radians)

Time is measured on a clock. One complete rotation (or shall I say a 360 degree rotation) of the minute hand signifies one hour in our daily lives. Mathematically one can say that when the minute hands rotates to an angle of 2pi radians, it has completed a full rotation (1 hour has passed).

So at midnight, on a mathematical clock, the time would read 0 pi
At 1am, the clock reads 2pi
At 2am, the clock reads 4pi
At 3am, the clock reads 6pi
.....
At noon, the clock reads 24pi
At 11pm, the clock reads 46pi

The idea is for students to create a schedule of their day.
ie:
07:00 Wake up
07:30 Eat Breakfast
08:00 Catch bus to school
09:00 School starts: Social Studies class
15:30 School is over, get on bus, go home

They then have to take the time in hours and convert it to radians.
ie.
14pi wake up
15pi Breakfast
16pi Bus
18pi School starts
31pi Go home

Once they have their day scheduled in radians, they then have to create an interesting re-telling their "RADical" day. Students can get creative by incorporating little details like "I had pi/8 of a pizza for lunch" etc. They can choose to present the story of their day in whichever medium they prefer: Movie, Poster, Power Point, Comic life, Flash, etc (preferably using some form of technology)

Once students have completed their project, they then have to trade with another group to analyze their story. The group has to take all of the radian times, and then convert it back to "normal" time.

This project is just a fun and silly way work with radian - degree - time conversion. It also plays a significant role in helping students visualize radian angles if they can relate it to a clock.

Thats all I have so far. Just ideas. I might try to create something in IO for it soon, but for now, my focus in on finishing the last 3 assignments for my BEd!
Woot Woot!

Reflection

Ive been reading excerpts from everyone's blog today, and I'm starting to see a lot of similarities....

1. iMovie and Movie Maker are not as user friendly as it claims to be.

Everyone that attempted creating a movie found this to be tricky! (Myself included) For part of my curriculum class last year we were to create a 3 minute iMovie introducing a unit in mathematics.... and we only had one week to complete it! OMG! How did I manage to finish this? I have no idea! Eventually, I was able to figure out how to do it, and produced an awful first video attempt! Luckily we had a chance to redeem ourselves at the end of the semester, where the videos turned out a little bit better,but still far from professional.

2. Technology can be intimidating.

I bet that just about everyone in our class have had to face their fear of technology. We hear about it... it sounds wonderful... but when it comes time to applying it in creative and effective ways in the classroom... BAH! Personally, my "fear" of technology comes from lacking the computer skills needed to bring my visions to life. I want to create animations and movies and music and pictures and websites and .....The list goes on. The other problem is that most of us were schooled in a very traditional setting without a whole lot of technology. How am I supposed to know which programs to use or which lessons lend themselves well to technology? When I was in school, computers were only used for word processing and creating powerpoint presentations. (very seldom)

3. We now know and understand the essence of Inquiry and Technology in the classroom.

After 4 semesters of inquiry, I never understood the process of it until this course. Everyone rages that inquiry is the future of education... yet they dont teach us how to design inquiry, which components are necessary for inquiry or even which types of tasks we want to include. Inquiry has always been this "thing" that no one could clearly define. Even now as I'm starting on my inquiry paper, I am still having a hard time explaining what inquiry is truly about. I have always thought that inquiry does not belong in the mathematics classroom.... yet here I find myself creating wonderful lessons that not only cover all the parts of the curriculum, but is guaranteed to engage each and every single learner in my classroom. I had no idea how to do this a few months ago.

4. Despite the frustrations, learning about technology is well worth it!

I dont think anyone regrets being in this class based ont he amount of learning that took place. The course load was heavy and stressful at times, but the rewards were definitely well worth it!

Technology: Friend or Foe?

My computer crashed this week and all I could think of was "How am I going to finish all of my projects in time for the end of the semester." I cried for hours. Its kind of sad how we get so attached to technology. I ended up having to get a new computer because the crash was caused by trying to run newer programs that my old little guy just couldn't handle.
That was 3 days ago, and I still feel debilitated by not having everything set up properly. Today, I found myself stressing about printer issues. My printer is a few years old, but works like a charm... However, the software that came along with it is not compatible with the latest version of Windows! Are you kidding me??? I was so stressed! Thank goodness for the Internet. With a little bit of searching, I was able to find a compatible driver that has my printer operating again. Phew!
I look back on my week now, and I cant believe how much time, energy, and tears went into this whole fiasco. Is this what technology has done to me? Made me so obsessed with staying connected that the thought of one day without it brings me to tears?

On the bright side.... I made another video for my ProSem presentation last week, and it turned out FANTASTIC! I'm really excited about it. Therefore, I will share it with all of you. The presentation dealt with sensitive emotional issues such as suicide and abuse. To set the tone of the class, I decided to present the case of a little girl, Rebecca (Fictional). The idea was to incorporate strong images, music, and tones to tug at the heartstrings of the audience.



And if that video has you feeling rather blue, I suggest watching this wonderful "feel good" clip of Tyson the Skateboarding Bulldog!

Foused Task Self Assessment

For the focused task, Reneeta and I chose to work with a Grade 12 graphing project. We thought it would be an easy project to do, but we soon found out that the technology part of it is actually much more tricky then first imagined. The task called for any means of technology that will aid with graphing. A graphing calculator, although plentiful in the classroom, would not have done the trick in this case, as there were boundary restrictions that needed to be considered while graphing the wine glass. We opted for a more advanced program, Maple, that we both have had some experience with. I was quite surprised at how long it took us to remember the codes and how to specify restrictions at first. However, with a little bit of practice and perseverance (and a lot of reading the Help manual) we were able to create an elegant program that did exactly what we wanted it to: Draw a picture of a wine glass.

I haven’t used Maple much for graphing, so being able to practice and play with it really helped a lot. I’ve been looking for a program that would create graphs to add to my professional library that I could use when designing tests and exams. I think Maple might just be the program I have been looking for. That alone was enough reason for me to engage in this task.

The mathematics component of this task, although it seemed complicated to the untrained eye, was actually the easiest part for Reneeta and I. The part that caused us grief was finding a way to present the math to our classmates who don’t necessarily have the same mathematical background. We decided to create a webpage along with a few iMovies to help explain the math. Creating the webpage and the movies presented a whole new challenge in itself. First of all, we had to decide where to post the webpage, which editor would we use, how would we link things together, how do we edit the HTML, etc. It was possibly the most challenging part of this assignment. I think we learned a lot from the experience though, and in the process we have both become experts in creating webpages. I would personally like to do some more PD regarding this, but in the mean time, I think I will be able to create and maintain a simplistic website.

Reneeta and I had the opportunity to work with iMovie in Semester 2 as part of our curriculum class. Despite the previous experience, we still had a lot of difficulty creating the videos. I think the content was the most challenging. How do we explain complicated mathematics to someone with limited expertise? It was a huge challenge, and we spent a lot of time working with it. The second movie (Mathematical Processes) did not come out the way we wanted it to. Personally, I think it was a pretty dry awful 10 minutes of torture. However, it was important for our peers to see the videos if they wanted to truly understand the mathematics. Did it really enhance our presentation? I don’t think so. The first video (Simplified Solution) was a much better addition to the task. It was clear, concise, and touched on all the main points that we needed to address.

The main challenge we had was how can we use technology effectively? A webpage is great, but if used uncreatively, it’s just an electronic version of a paper. Similar challenges present itself when using PowerPoint. We needed to shy away from that. We tried adding links to exploration applets that might be of interest to our students, using online feedback mechanisms, and creating “how to” movies that might assist in completion of the task. I think we could have increased the creativity factor if we had more knowledge about the technology we were using. It is something that will come with time, so I’m not too concerned about that right now.

Overall, I learned a lot from this project. As far as technology goes, I significantly increased my knowledge and familiarity with Maple, Freewebs, iMovie and Movie Maker. All of these programs are things that I will take with me into my teaching career.