Introductions
Please introduce yourself, let us know a little bit about you, and where you are from.
Tags: introduce
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anne Pemberton on
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kHushaboo,
Just took a look at your site. Will spend more time exploring it later. The first thing I noted was that you include an activity to color shapes. I use the same technique to introduce addition to students on my math pages at http://www.educationalsynthesis.org/mrsp/math .... Children draw and color the designated numer of shapes then count them to add. For subtraction, the student draws the shapes, then crosses out the number being subtracted. There are worksheet to use draw and color to get the beginning concepts of multiplication and division. Take a look at my "random number" worksheets, and let me know if any are useful to you. If so, you may want to include a link on you page. I am going to add your site to mine sometime this week.
Anne
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Permalink Reply by kHUSHBOO on
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Hi Anne
Thanxs for your support. However the activity that you see on the home page is not an activity to teach addition but introducing the concept of area to the kids. Initially we want the kids to count the squares enclosed within the given shape and the shape here is rectangle. As they count the number of tiles they estimate the area of the shape i.e rectangle. To make it colorful we also ask them to color as they count. This way they can calculate the area even if they are not knowing the formula for the same.
As you said you will be possibly exploring the site, you will come across variety of activities that illustrates the concepts without being too abstract. I have seen your home page and found it good and very helpful. Will be looking it in detail...and give you feedback very soon.
Does the act on the homepage looks more like a coloring activity...just let me know ....perhaps i will have to possibly redo it.
Wish you a great year ahead ..
Regards
Khushboo
http://www.inhomeacademy.com
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Kushboo,
I went back to your site and saw what you said about that activity. It is a good way to introduce area. I use the drawing of shapes to teach addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and it seems to be popular.
If you can do it with your tools, perhaps you could make one a little harder, and tell the student the number on each side of a shape, that the shape is a rectangle, and let them color blocks without the guidelines of the rectangle shape. If the problem is 3 x 5, have a grid of 7 x 7 blocks, and ask the student to just color in a rectable of 3X5. I hope I am making myself clear. I think it would add a level of difficulty to the activity as you have it now.
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Hi Anne
Very true.....let me develop your idea and see how i can use your idea to increase the difficulty level. But i really see a point in what you are saying. Anne i am currently developing ideas on multiplication and i have listed few activities but i am not having anything significant to teach three digit multiplication. I am thinking of place value blocks and dominoes but nothing more then that....let me know if you have any more ideas on the same. This is 3 digit multiplication with a single digit number.
Regards
Khushboo
http//www.inhomeacademy.com
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KHushoo,
I will put on my thinking cap and see what I come up with. It sounds like you are saying that the problem is in place value, and being able to "carry" to another place. The place value blocks will work well, so would use of poker chips. If getting the poker chips is too pricey, or problematical because of community objection to "gambling", you could make your own by cutting up paper in four colors, into circles or squares. You could write a 1, 10, 100, 1000 on each square or circle.
If you like, I could easily make a page that lets you print out these pieces either on colored paper, or printed on standard white paper in the colors.
I wonder if an abacus would be helpful. I don't know how to multiply on an abacus - I am in the process of learning more about this tool. I know you can use a slide rule for multiplication, but it's been so long since I used a slide rule, I would have to learn how to use it all over again.
Anne
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Permalink Reply by Brad Gessler on
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Hey, I'm Brad Gessler from Poll Everywhere in Chicago. We're interested in hearing all about how educators take advantage of wireless technology in their classrooms (like SMS Voting). If you have any ideas, please let me know.
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Permalink Reply by Derek Brandow on
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My name is Derek Brandow and I used to teach in a traditional public ed. classroom. My students and I used a blog called Room 313 to do a lot of learning together. I have since moved on to other mediums of teaching.
One of the most current projects I am working on is building an online school, facilitating "flat learning". The four goals are to build:
critical thinkers
problem solvers
collaborators
people who understand and use technology intuitively
Basically we are creating an environment where children are preparing for a real world experience.
I'd love to connect with people who share a similar desire and who have different experiences with this.
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Dereck,
It would seem to me that the fourth goal requires the preceding ones in order to happen.
Yet, you can use the technology as a substitute for pencil and paper, as well as to develop critical thinking skills, collaboration, and problem solving. Technolgy can be tailored to whatever level you need to reach and whatever learning style you are catering to.
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Ah yes, I too once looked at it this way until I entertained the possibility that the fourth does not require the preceding three in order to happen, but perhaps Critical thinking, Problem solving, and Collaboration cannot happen in a way that will prepare students for the world when they graduate from high school unless we provide the opportunity to use technology in learning which allows for new and appropriate collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving.
As a teacher I was once excited to think my students were using technology when the assignment called for them to use the Internet to research topics for reports they would then present using word processing.
To take our existing curriculum and 100 year old (tried but true) philosophies of education and plug them into technology the way you suggest and the way I outlined is no use of technology as a learning tool, but an expensive replacement for an encyclopedia, paper and pencil, and there is no substantial point to it.
What I am interested in considering is how we can accomplish the first three by the fourth, how we can challenge the last 100 years of public education practices (that worked relatively well up through the 80's and maybe even 90's) and really prepare our students for a world they will live and compete when they leave high school.
Anne, Perhaps this might be a bigger discussion for a side tab? I would be interested in hearing from you and other teachers who get and love technology and learning, and examine how it is working now, and how it needs to work to prepare our students for their future. I am interested in turning the last 100 years of public education on its head and seeing what happens.
Derek
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Derek,
Yes, this is a topic for a side list rather than on Introductions. From what I have seen on my first few weeks on here, this is the place to find those who want to collaborate on the future.
One of the advantages to using the Internet for research, is that you can find the most current information. An Encyclopedia is outdated as soon as it is published, boxed up, and shipped to the school. The Internet tends to provide the newest information. In building my website, which is probably more in tune with the "old way" of using the computer, since I feel that we will need that use of the Internet for some time yet, I have learned how many areas, particularly in science and history, have been revisited and updated since I learned "the facts" in school myself. Before I retired, I was doing a demo lesson to show how to use the spreadsheet for 5th grade science, and explored the oceans of the world. I learned that the ocean around Antarctica is not longer called the Antarctic Ocean, but is now called the Southern ocean. When I mentioned this in my demo lesson, I educated a whole panel of administrators who also did not know the ocean had changed names, actually some twenty years ago.
I think some of the solutions of how to really develop the use of computers in education should come from the creativity of the students themselves. Us adults have a habit of looking at a tool in the same way over and over, whereas someone without all that heavy experience, can look at it in a totally new way. I was just writing to a friend, who believed that the reason the people who created those "buy one, donate one" little computers, left off the spreadsheet. He did not see any applications that the little ones could use. So I told him of my experiences using spreadsheets with K-2 students. Excel has s lot of good applicatons for the little ones. They need to learn the concept of rows, columns, and cells anyway, and they can learn it much easier in first grade than in high school. You can insert graphs into worksheets, and as the student enters the values in cells, they can see the effect on the graph. You can also insert pictures and use color in creative ways on a spreadsheet. It could even be used like graph paper (set the columns and rows to equal values), and draw a shape on it and calculate the area by counting the squares, just as was done with us back when.
Right now, Rashmi Khushaboo and I are contemplating how to illustrate multi-digit multiplication in an online game, not manipulating the numerals, but manipulating shapes or other concrete objects. We want to illustrate the concept of a three digit number multiplied by a one digit number to get the kids started. Do you have any ideas to contribute?
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I think I hear where you are coming form, and I agree. There are so many great applications available as tools to use in the learning process, and I am not suggesting to reinvent those wheels. Hopefully we can consider how to direct student in a way that allows them to find and use the applications that are appropriate to solve real problems, much like we do as adults in the real world, much like you and Rashmi are doing now to create the online math game. I have a question, Are any students involved in the process of creating this game? Could students learn this concept, perhaps more concretely, and have more of a real world "task" sense in their contributions?
I believe the answer to these questions is, yes.
What I would love to do it work with the two of you to see how we can get kids involved in the critical thinking and problem solving of this by collaboration and using the applications (technology) to do so.
what do you think?
Where should we side bar our conversation, and allow others to jump in?
Peace,
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Permalink Reply by Jason Gallic on
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Hi, Anne, my name is Jason Gallic, and I'm working with Derek as we attempt to reframe the way that education is conducted and delivered. I, myself, bring a background in consulting and progressive technology thinking. But I have always had a heart for education and for the way that kids develop the skills necessary to navigate and excel in the world.
It seems to me that we ought to at least consider what it might look like to shift the current paradigm. And that means: 1) exploring the integration of technology into systems of knowledge acquisition that are tried and true; 2) re-evaluating those tried and true methods.
In the last 24 hours I've seen in blogs multiple occurences of the following sentiment shared by young high school students: "When I go to school, I have to power down." I take that to mean a variety of things. Here are two of them: 1) These students are having to back away from technolgies with which they have become "handed". In this case, "handed" means becoming so comfortable or familiar with a task that you can do it without conscious consideration. By the time we're 17, for instance, driving has become a handed activity in that we don't have to carefully consider each step -- we just know; 2) Because technology has given them such incredible access to information -- and, consequently, an improved ability to think for themselves -- these students are, essentially, having to dumb down when they walk into the classroom.
Scary. If we're not pushing them to use, for the purposes of education, the tools that occupy so much of their lives, then isn't the education process fighting against the tide of development that's swelling ever higher?
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