Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

One of my goals this semester was to figure out ways to use AI as a helpful tool for teaching. As a result, my students have experimented with AI in both the Technology for STEM Educators course and the Assessment in STEM Education course. When it comes to lesson planning as a teacher, we need to be realistic. Teachers aren’t going to create detailed multi-page lesson plans for each course every day. And there will be some days that they will be stressed because they don’t have a plan for the next class period.  During these stressful times as a teacher, I think that it would be good to use AI to come up with a basic lesson plan. After exploring some AI tools, one of our favorites was Gemini . It isn’t one of the AI tools designed specifically for teachers, but it does a very good job when given explicit directions. We used it to create a detailed lesson plan and also discovered that it is great for creating rubrics for summative assessments, such as projects, presentations, or o...

Definition : A building thinking classroom helps change the way students are learning. Students are encouraged to learn and explore new techniques while being guided by a teacher. Students learn vertically on a whiteboard where they can erase problems and learn by proving definitions. This is mostly done in group work while changing groups f requently to work with different perspe ctives. The biggest kicker of this type of classroom is NO NOTES; there are barely any notes for students to take because they learn by doing or struggling through questions .   Pros: This approach to learning math presents a lot of positive areas of growth for students . For one, it encourages students to problem-solve and critically think as they work through unfami liar problems with little initial direction. It also gives students many opportunities to collaborate with classmates, and not just their friends. Switching up the learning groups allows students to see and share different methods for...

The way students learn is constantly changing , and teachers must be able to adapt to those changes. Just because your teaching style was effective last year doesn’t necessarily mean that it will carry over to the next year. As educators, we will have to continue developing our teaching skills and styles to become the best teachers we can. Thus, it’s time all teachers start looking into other options that may best help the ir students learn. So, we will talk about some of the options out there and explain t he benefits that go with each one .  One style of teaching that would benefit the classroom is a flipped classroom . According to Harvard University, a flipped classroom is when students cover the material by themselves before class . When the students get to class it opens lecture time for deeper intellectual discussions on the material, instead of spending most of the class in a lecture . Some of the benefits that a flipped classroom provides is that it allows stud...