We did it--classes are done for this crazy year!

I always get the privilege of writing the last #Math371 blog post of the semester. I like to reflect on what I have learned while teaching this course that semester. While I will do some of that, I will also reflect on things the students have shared throughout the semester.

For the past 2 years, I have asked the #Math371 students to create a Desmos Activity Builder. This year I decided to make that task more formal and give them a list of items that needed to be included in their activity. I got feedback on the activity before I assigned it from Mark Kreie, Brookings High School math teacher. He was very helpful and offered great suggestions. I feel like this was one of the most successful assignments this semester. The students did a great job and many of them are now excited about using Desmos in their classroom. After they created their activity, they also had to reflect on the experience. Here are a few excerpts from journal entries:

• I think it would be good to use this as an interactive lesson in the classroom versus as a homework assignment. It facilitates lots of group discussion and it allows the opportunity to correct student misconceptions immediately.
• I decided that this tool is best utilized not as a method to teach new material to students, but a way to find entertaining new ways to show the new material that has been taught.
• Creating an activity for a classroom was rather fun to me. I felt like I was playing teacher and thinking about my students and how this kind of stuff would make the most sense to them. For me, that was really fun to experience the work teachers have to put in to make a good activity.

Another project that I improved for this semester was the group teaching project. I divided students into groups, assigned them a Learning Management System, and they had to create a video lesson, a homework assignment, and a quiz in their course that they created in their LMS. This assignment wasn’t without issues as I assigned one group Moodle and we discovered that it involved downloading software so I switched them to a different one, which also didn’t work well. They finally decided that they wanted to use Edmodo. In general, this was a good assignment as they had to figure out their own LMS as a teacher as well as understand the other groups’ systems as a student. I feel like we all learned something from this project. In their reflection on this project, some students said:

• Overall, I liked being able to experience the different system in this project. Before I worked on this project, I had only used Google Classroom. I liked being able to see the pros and cons of each different management system as the student’s point of view. This is only going to help me make a better choice for my classroom in the future.
• Nevertheless, the LMS project made me ponder about what I like and dislike in LMS and gave me appreciated experience with using a system from the perspective of a teacher.

Despite the pandemic, we had another great semester in #Math371. We all learned new things and had fun in the process—well, at least I did. I always feel so lucky because SDSTATE has awesome students! I can’t wait to watch them grow and become great math teachers.