Presentations

I organized a choice of projects and backed the number down from 3 to 1 because my students are not used to creating anything.  The students tend to freeze when faced with what they see as something that is insurmountable.  I am giving them a bit of time once a week to work on it and they are very much into the "Am I doing this right?" and "What do I do next."  Overall, some of the students are starting to take small fledgling steps.  Since they are easily frustrated, I put most students on Haiku Deck to create their presentations.  Haiku deck is free and it allows them to change the theme, text, make lists, add pictures and has pictures available for use.  It is a good app to start students in creating a digital work. 
This project is also allowing students to learn how to write their own material and learn it better.  It is another way of presenting it to them.  I went over plagiarism and explained that if they take anything off the internet, they must give credit to the person who originally created it.  My students are so used to being allowed to cut and paste anything they want in their computer classes that it is a fight to get them to understand they cannot do that without proper acknowledgement.
I do not need to run the text through anything because so many of my students are ELL and if the phrasing does not sound like them,  I simply ask them to clarify what they wrote and usually they can't tell me what it means so they have to rewrite it.
This is also the first time I have assigned something like this so I am trying to help them learn the app, learn to create something that will match up with Blooms Digital Taxonomy, and teach them about paraphrasing and plagiarism.  Did I mange it?  I don't know but I do know this is a learning experience for both the students and myself.

rewriting my plan of attack.

Last night I got to thinking that many of my students go through the motions of doing the problems without developing a deeper understanding of the math itself.  This means I have not spent enough time in my teaching helping them develop the understanding so I need to focus on making assignments so they require higher level of thinking.  I know too often I resort to the simple calculations. 
I've decided when we do linear equations, I am going to have them find real life examples that use slope along with providing an explanation of what slope tells us.  I think an infographic or similar activity would be good for this.  It is time to revisit what I need taught and how it will be done.  Up to know I've used previous plans with technology inserted as best I could but now I am going to rethink my plans and ideas to see if I can improve .
I need to consult Blooms digital taxonomy to see if I can utilize higher levels of thinking so maybe they will do better. 
Tomorrow and Thursday my ebook on "Teaching Math using an iPad will be available on Amazon for free.  It is a short ebook talking about certain types of apps and specific suggestions for using them in the math class room.  I admit this is geared for older students but you might find some things applicable in the elementary rooms.

plans already

The school year here is down to the last two weeks.  We are finishing up inverse functions and I"m having the students use  a graphing app to graph their inverse functions.  Its been educational for me in that I will have to figure out news ways of teaching the material so they can see a continuity between the equations and their inverses.  They treat each problem as a new problem, different from all the others before.  I think this might have something to do with the local culture.
I had down loaded a couple apps that advertised they could be used by students to practice algebra or geometry.  The problem with these two apps is simply that neither the student nor I have a way to select the level or type of questions.  Since I had no voice in the selection of the questions, my students were getting questions that might be on material at the end of the year rather than at that moment.  In addition, the questions might quiz the student on something I am not teaching because it is AP material. 
I am going to explore apps over the summer to see which ones can be used to create more indepth teaching experiences for the students.  I want to use activities that are further up on Blooms digital taxonomy.  I want them to experience more authentic work.  Over the past few days, I have taken time to ask students where we use certain things in real life to try to build their knowledge base.
As I check out apps, I'll let you know what I find.

Subject specific apps

I just read something in edudemic.com in which the author said that too often people look for subject specific apps rather than the more general ones to utilize.  That is quite true but in math, there are certain subject specific apps I've had to look for.  For instance, when I teach conic sections, I want a graphing app that will allow the students to graph ellipses, circles, hyperbolas, and parabolas without having to rewrite them into the y = something format.  I actually found one,MathGraph from the iTunes store.  It allows my students to graph all the conic sections and they have a choice of orienting it either vertically or horizontally.  It also has a small quiz section for each type of conic section.  It also does lines, exponents, log and ln.  I like using this particular app for my Algebra II and College prep classes.
While surfing today I discovered this website:
 http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2012/08/the-top-educational-ipad-apps-every.html
It lists 100 apps for the iPad but it is divided into topics such as Digital learning, Blooms Digital Taxonomy, etc. The one for Blooms Digital Taxonomy lists suggestions of apps for each level from creating to remembering.  This is one I am going to explore in more detail over the summer when I have  bit more time.