Professional Development

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)-http://www.nctm.org/- This is essentially their sales pitch: A membership connects you with exclusive resources and mathematics education expertise, connection to a network of 90,000 people who care about mathematics education, and the ongoing effort to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics. I am a huge fan of giving students extra resources for learning and making them available online. I think that being a part of this organization will help me as a teacher and help to give students some great extra resources for their benefit.

International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)-http://www.iste.org/welcome.aspx-Here is their pitch for joining: Participate in ISTE's member communities to expand your professional learning network, and sharpen your skills by using our NETS-aligned learning resources with thousands of ed tech resources available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we’re here to support your professional learning on your own terms. I think that the best way for a teacher to keep things new and exciting is keeping up with technology and using it when it is effective and engaging for students. Having access to many educational technology resources and learning how to use them is going to help keep me at the cutting edge of technology in education.

TED-http://www.ted.com/-I have seen a lot of useful educational videos from this website. It is more of educational philosophy stuff than "how to" things that I have benefited from. Before I started student teaching I thought my views would change a little, but not much and they have changed a ton since my student teaching experience. I am now more open than ever to thinking about different ways of teaching. Our philosophies are ever evolving and should be to be effective teachers.

Emerging Ed Tech on Twitter-https://twitter.com/#!/EmergingEdTech-This Twitter feed posts many articles, blogs, etc. about cutting edge educational technology and other education based things.

Steve Hargadon on Twitter-https://twitter.com/#!/stevehargadon-This Twitter feed posts about events, articles, blogs, resources etc. about educational technology.

Curriculum Materials and Resources

My schools math department really plays by it's own rules in a sense because we are a charter school. We don't really do anything along with the other public schools in our area. We are the alternative to the traditional public school. RPA is the Redmond Proficiency Academy is proficiency based so the students are required to meet the standards that all other students in the public schools are supposed to meet, but it is required for all of our students to meet each individual standard instead of having to pass a class where all of the standards are lumped in to one grade.

There are only two math teachers at RPA and RPA uses moodles in all of their classes which are basically class websites that can be accessed by students and teachers. Both teachers have all of their lessons, powerpoints, homeworks, and extra practice assignments on their websites. The teacher that I work closest with records all of his lectures and posts them online as well so that students have no excuse to not know what is going on. He also has Khan Academy pages set up for each lesson which students use often. We use a program called WizIQ to record the lectures and it shows what we write, say, and video of the classroom. Every student can access any lecture or anything they may need for class to stay on track. It is great because parents can access their child's grades and see where they need to be in class. It helps them to get involved and keep their child on track if their child struggles to do so on their own. This is especially true for younger high school students.

I have started a Facebook and a Twitter for my classes which one of the math teachers does as well. Students don't use it much, but especially the Facebook page you can use to send out updates on what is coming up in class, etc. so students will receive a live update of anything you want them to know assuming they check their Facebook often, which most of them seem to do every five minutes. My Twitter account for class is mostly for following other math related Twitter accounts. They are mostly too advanced for high school students, but I post things every once in a while that are pertinent to class and what we are working on.

Routine-Intro to New Topic

The topic that I taught was on completing the square. We have not worked on this yet, but had worked on converting previous forms of quadratic equations over the past few days. I figured that this was so different that it counted as a new topic. The video is just a recording off of the smart board. It was either see what I was writing or see the class, so I figured the writing was more important so you can make sense of it. I could only get it on youtube and not vimeo because my teacher has them all converted to youtube for her classes. I apologize if it is too long. It is a whole lesson. I needed the whole thing to send to a student who was out with a relative who passed.

My strengths were having students involved in the lesson rather than just lecturing them. I try to have them lead me through the lesson by asking leading questions. I observed student learning by asking a lot of questions to see how they were understanding. I also had about a half hour of students working on problems while I walked around observing so I could see how they were doing. I also checked for understanding by asking them to rate their understanding 1-3, 3 being the highest. There were only about five different students who were answering/asking questions. This is a very small class, only about 12 students. Even though you can't see the students, there are only probably two students that aren't engaged. That is easy to fall in to because this is my last class of the day so students are tired which makes it challenging. Addressing varied abilities did not come up much because most of the students are on the same page. The students who did not understand spoke up when needed and that was about as far as it went. My role in supporting learning was having students guide me through the lesson. One challenge I observed was getting students to participate early on. Since this is a small class late in the day it is pretty difficult at times to get this group to participate. I would probably revise this lesson by having students work on problems on their own more in the middle of the lesson so that they are getting a chance to try and can figure out whether they really understand what we are doing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYwi2_lF-cU&feature=youtu.be

Summary of Quadratics Pre-Test

Most of my students (Willamette cohorts) still need to learn the quadratic equation which is a huge part of this unit. I will need to find a song or a rhyme for them to make it easier to remember. Students did well solving equations, so that made me feel that I am focusing more on the work and not enough on the importance of it and why they need to know it. Most students at this level know how to solve equations, so it is important that I focus on why quadratics are different and what they need to be looking out for.

Overall I was pleased with the results of the pre-test. I gave my pre-test to my actual students yesterday and they did very poorly (which I expected). Most of them got the true/false and multiple choice questions and missed everything else. I think one person got any question right outside of those and I have tested about 20 students so far. Since most students haven't learned about quadratics before I will be teaching a new concept so it will be fun to see how well everyone does. I have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks as I go teach my work sample.

Here is a link to my results from my cohorts. I had my students in class take it as a paper test.

Video of Teaching Warm-Ups

Here is a link to my warm up video. I couldn't figure out how to email it to you all. The quality is pretty good but I am using a new program so I did not know this was the way it would turn out. You can't see much. Sorry. It picks up a few minutes in, but you don't miss much. My teacher is putting the screen together so that is why it starts out with a computer desktop screen. We are reviewing scientific notation that we learned in the last class. I think that the biggest strengths in my teaching of warm ups were that I made students explain everything and answer the questions so that it wasn't just me talking the whole time and explaining. I got a good sense of how much information they retained. The evidence of student learning was in the responses. I don't think there was a lot of activity and engagement, so I think it seemed like there was less than there really is. I don't think many of the students were engaged, you couldn't see but there were about 20 students in the class and it sounded like there were four. I am really struggling at this school because students are not very active in class. They mostly expect to be taught and not respond. My role in supporting learning was to help lead students to the right answer when they were struggling to find the answer. One challenge that I observed was that there was a lot of wasted time waiting for students to answer and respond. I need to find a way to be more engaging to students who are not used to being active in class. Most of the other teachers just lecture the whole class while everyone is quiet. The typical mistakes students made were mostly due to focus. Students tended to guess on a lot of answers instead of thinking. I could tell they were reluctant to answer due to lack of confidence and that many of the students are shy. I would revise this routine by maybe starting out with something fun or just me having more energy in general. Engaging the students early and setting the tone for the whole class would help improve the warm-ups and the entire class.

Algebra 2 Quadratics Pre-Test

Here is a link to my pre-test. I will try to get it on here, but click the link just in case. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated because this is the one I plan on using for my class. If it sends you to the spreadsheet, just click on forms and "go to live form" and it should appear in the way where you could take the test.