Will Simkins Week 4 Journal
This was a relatively light/easy week of class, but I still learned a ton and had some great discussions with my classmates.
We held our content-area class for math online this week, since Zenon was not in Rochester and itw as definitely an interesting experience. I've used Zoom before for two other classes, but the format of those classes was significantly different from the format this week and also both classes had three times as many students. In the first class we discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of Zoom and similar tools and so it was cool to experience it first hand after that discussion. I definitely noticed that I got distracted and mentally exhausted much faster this week despite the class being substantially shorter. In addition, I thought the discussion we had was a little bit less natural and productive than it might have been if we were all in the same physical classroom. Conversely, I thought the Zoom tools for screen sharing and presenting were really cool and I greatly enjoyed the mini presentations everyone did on the exploration they did in GeoGebra.
Speaking of GeoGebra, I had a great time exploring it even further this week and I think it's an incredible tool that I can definitely imagine using in my classroom in the future. Having a chance to explore the tool and then share and learn from everyone else who also explored was a really important experience which will shape the way I interact with technology as an educator for the rest of my career. We've already begun planning a lesson that utilizes GeoGebra as well and this collaborative lesson-design process is a new experience to me that I'm learning a ton from (especially since my group members are significantly more experienced than me).
Finally, I got the chance to explore some new tools for the wikispace assignment and found a tool called CueThink that I really think is incredible. Reading about CueThink and about the way that real teachers have used it in their classroom has made me reconsider a few things about teaching math, especially to younger kids, and has given me a ton of ideas about how to design lessons that I'm really looking forward to implementing.
I can't wait to get back together as an entire class and hear about what all the other content areas learned in these last couple weeks! I hope it's as exciting as everything we did in the math content area.
We held our content-area class for math online this week, since Zenon was not in Rochester and itw as definitely an interesting experience. I've used Zoom before for two other classes, but the format of those classes was significantly different from the format this week and also both classes had three times as many students. In the first class we discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of Zoom and similar tools and so it was cool to experience it first hand after that discussion. I definitely noticed that I got distracted and mentally exhausted much faster this week despite the class being substantially shorter. In addition, I thought the discussion we had was a little bit less natural and productive than it might have been if we were all in the same physical classroom. Conversely, I thought the Zoom tools for screen sharing and presenting were really cool and I greatly enjoyed the mini presentations everyone did on the exploration they did in GeoGebra.
Speaking of GeoGebra, I had a great time exploring it even further this week and I think it's an incredible tool that I can definitely imagine using in my classroom in the future. Having a chance to explore the tool and then share and learn from everyone else who also explored was a really important experience which will shape the way I interact with technology as an educator for the rest of my career. We've already begun planning a lesson that utilizes GeoGebra as well and this collaborative lesson-design process is a new experience to me that I'm learning a ton from (especially since my group members are significantly more experienced than me).
Finally, I got the chance to explore some new tools for the wikispace assignment and found a tool called CueThink that I really think is incredible. Reading about CueThink and about the way that real teachers have used it in their classroom has made me reconsider a few things about teaching math, especially to younger kids, and has given me a ton of ideas about how to design lessons that I'm really looking forward to implementing.
I can't wait to get back together as an entire class and hear about what all the other content areas learned in these last couple weeks! I hope it's as exciting as everything we did in the math content area.
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