3D Printer and more Technology in the Classroom (plus the last Step II lesson of the semester)

 The week before Thanksgiving was pretty busy as it usually does as the semester draws to a close with all of its final presentations and final exams. I think that the first thing I want to talk about this week is my final lesson for Step II since I will be writing 5E lesson plans to close out the semester. Unlike the two previous lessons, my time management was poor. I made the strategic decision in the middle of the lesson to forego the evaluation I had prepared since our statistical examination that closes Step II will look at one evaluation in particular. The lesson was productive for my own growth. Upon reflection, I realized why my time management was so bad. On the surface, it looked like I had just allowed students too much time in the exploration section of the lesson. Looking more closely, I realized that I should have stopped the exploration section. Many students gave answers that indicated that either the lesson section's instructions were unclear or that the students ...
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Breakout Rooms and Technology to Aid Engagement

 This week we worked through a "Break Out Room" activity in class and then spent the last class of the week designing our own. It made me think about the TED Talk we started the semester with. I feel like part of an educator's role in society is helping kids stay on the right path. The educators in that TED Talk highlighted how absenteeism is one of the strongest predictors of bad outcomes for young people. In this light, it seems like lessons that combine learning and problem-solving in a fun way keep students engaged and in the classroom. I think that our Step 3 learning would be greatly enhanced with peer-reviewed studies that highlight the effectiveness of these lesson types. Armed with that information, I feel like educators will be more likely to embrace novel teaching methods and unique efforts like breakout rooms. I know that when my group worked on them, they were a challenge, although sometimes the challenge arose from the puzzling nature of the question rather than the question itself. In any case, I hope that we can look more closely at tools like Break Out Rooms in a peer-reviewed setting to know how they work, what they accomplish, and how effective they are in meeting those goals.

Creating our own Break Out Room is a challenge. It requires a background story and activities that align with it. For my own, the most creative thing that I have come up with is the idea that Math Aliens that have invaded Earth from the Rational Function Galaxy are obsessed with Nike shoes. These aliens are fluent in asymptotes of all kinds and they wear shoes with the same logo back home. The brand name is different however, and students must determine the name of that shoe brand in the Math alien's galaxy.

In Step 2, I will have my last teaching session this Thursday and I look forward to talk about ratios with my class. My focus this time will be on time management. I plan to work on moving students through the lesson in a way that aligns with learning and task completion. This part of teaching has been a struggle and that is why I am choosing to particularly focus on it this week.

Returning to activities like Break Out Rooms, I am curious to learn what the literature has to say about comparisons between standard homework, readings, answers, and handout class sites and those that are more interactive. I certainly think that they may help reduce absenteeism and am also curious to know if there are other, repeated, and reproduced results that point to other facets of these types of online activities that we haven't been made aware of. I think that pointers towards these types of resources and discussions about them can go a long to way to dispel luddite tendencies. 


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