Math 371 Technology for STEM Educators

            Personally, I have been playing video games since I was around 10 or 11 years old.  Growing up with games titles such as Call of Duty, Clash of Clans, and Sims, I have experienced some of the most popular games of my generation. This experience has allowed me to see the positives and negatives of gaming; through my mathematics education major, I was introduced to the concept of learning through digital games. This has intrigued me and has led me to explore the benefits of gaming in a classroom setting.              Being a junior in college, I am just now starting to get into my major. I have gotten past most of my generals and now am working on filling my own ‘toolbox’ for my teaching career. When I first started looking into this concept of learning through gaming I was on board immediately, but as I thought about my motivation toward this subject, I had to ...

            My entire high school career was very difficult. I was a three - sport athlete, a student in advanced classes, and involved in other extra-curricular activities, and worked a part-time job. It was a rare occasion when I w ould have free time because of the amount of homework that I had be en assigned in my 7 classes. Many times I would lose sleep or be forced to do homework on bus rides in order to finish it . Even now as a full time college student who works, I still face the same challenge as I did in high school : finding time for homework. Now when I step back and watch others go through the same struggles, including my younger sister, it makes me wonder, why do teachers give students homework ?             All types of students in various stages of schooling go through the same thing. As an example, middle school students having time with their family is a...

            As a Junior Math Education Major, the fear of the future keeps making its presence known. One year from now I am supposed to be teaching the youth of our world. Am I ready? Do I really have what it takes to be a teacher?             When I was little, I was that girl that loved to play school every day. I would set up my classroom with white boards and teach “my class” anything I could think of. Teaching back then just meant that I could doodle all over a white board and since I am the youngest in my family, it meant that I could finally be in charge! I wasn’t afraid of anything. Now when I look at teaching I find fear in everything. Will I be creative enough? Will I be able to handle a classroom? Do I know my content area enough? Will I…             This idea of fear has been in my head for ...

                Back in my second professional semester I ran into a problem. Each of the students would have to pair off classmates of the same major for a specific project, the only problem is there is not another physics education major at SDSU. It was a pretty interesting situation, I don’t think I would have changed it for the world, but it did make the class projects a little strange. One experience that I love talking about is when I had to team up with Noelle and Lindsey, an art major and a math major, to complete a unit planning project. At first it seemed like an odd combination, but I think it turned into a pretty good lesson and unit. I’m remembering this story now because it was brought to the forefront of my memory after I attended a session on the same topic at the SDCTM and SDSTA conference.                 The session that I attended was entitled “Scie...

             In all of my education classes thus far, we have spent some time discussing alternative forms of assessment. It seems so effortless for the English, history, and art education majors to form a long list of assessment options. However, it truly feels like mathematics is the most difficult class to avoid using tests and quizzes as a method for assessing students’ understanding of material. I do not think tests and quizzes should be ruled out altogether but I agree that other forms of formative and summative assessment should be used. This brings me to what we talked about this week in Math 371: online quizzes. Can online quizzes be considered an alternative form of assessment? Yes, and here’s why.               As a class, we took quizzes on the app called Socrative, Google Forms, and Quizziz. Though we did not use Kahoot! this week because we were all familiar with this app...

As a future educator in mathematics, the thing I fear the most is my students losing their ability and freedom to express themselves in my classroom. Comparatively speaking, math is one of the core subjects that seemingly limits students in this area. I innately think of the possibilities English students have, being able to express themselves through the words of their papers. Art students can display bits of their personalities and interests within their works. Math students…”Please find x .   And again…and again…and again.” And this fear becomes even more prominent in thinking of the math teachers who know only one way of solving problems, or only teaching their students one method to do so. It concerns me as I think of all my future right-brained students who are forced to sit within my class and try somehow to make sense of what they are expected to learn. I then think of the many future students who are categorized within one of the seven multiple intelligences that isn...

     Once again we started the Math 371 course by having students make a list of technology items that they wanted to learn.   I also included a few of my own and we came up with this list: Promethean Board & SMARTBoard TI-Nspire iPad—how to use these in math Free online resources—Desmos, Geogebra, electronic gradebooks, lesson planning software, interactive note-taking, etc. Blogs Twitter Pinterest Online Course management—Edmodo, Schoology, Moodle? Google Docs, Apps, and Add-ons Flipped Instruction Personalized Learning 3D printing Coding Microsoft Excel Teaching online high school math classes   Copyright laws regarding use of internet sources for teaching        Now comes my task of planning how to get all of this done in the course.   This is probably the hardest part for me when it comes to this course, although this list is fairly similar to last year’s so it may be easier.   Another cha...