Making Math Matter
Throughout my teaching and learning experiences I strive to make my math classes meaningful for my students. Through working on my masters and engaging in virtual teaching I found that I often need to be creative with technology to achieve my goal. This page showcases some of my math creations throughout my masters journey as well as in my classroom.
This page focuses on the math specific creations that demonstrate how my educational technology skills integrate into math. It is broken down between teacher resources and student projects. To see their incorporation into Social Emotional Learning (SEL) click the link below.
Teacher Resources
Error Analysis
This is an error analysis template which can be used for almost any math concept. This is created for middle school math students and is a worksheet to help them dive deeper into the content. The purpose of this assignment is not for students to get the "right answer" but rather explain their reasoning. While creating this I leaned the importance of creating open ended prompts for students to use as well as the benefit of sentence stems to help students express themselves. In this project I demonstrated my ability to create critical questions for student reflection and apply a skill across skills using a template.
Foundational Facts
For this creation I focused on how to best support students in the learning of multiplication facts. This is a teacher resource page with links of activities that can be adapted for individual or small group practice. This resource includes an interview style assessment as while as resources tied to the different categories. This focuses on the first facts that are important to know. From this assignment I learned the value of interview style assessments and how to analyze data to create a plan for student intervention. In this project I demonstrated my ability to break a concept to the sub skills and target interventions to meet individual student needs.
Appropriate Units of Measure
This creation is a collection of resources I have created and compiled about measurement. This is a teacher focused tool that offers a variety of tools to meet student needs. This resource uses a variety of different technology rescores to address this topic. My favorite tool is the Desmos Polygraph, which promotes vocabulary rich discussion. From this I learned that using a variety of intentional technology pieces can help students develop a deeper understanding of the topic. In this activity I demonstrated my ability to provide instruction on content vocabulary and create lessons that foster academic discussions.
Student Projects
Graphing Points
Graphing is a challenge for many middle school students. This is an interactive project based unit that teaches students graphing skills and to demonstrate their learning. This project breaks down the skill for students in an interactive and applicable way- through video games. This helped me learn how to integrate student interests into learning and how to create an interactive digital lesson. In this project I demonstrated my ability of creating interactive lessons which allow students to both learn and demonstrate a high level of mastery.
Probability
This is a social justice project focused on how probability and traffic stops compare. What I found interesting when using this with middle school students is that they made different connections then I did. From this my perspective was challenged and I learned the value of incorporating social justice into the curriculum. In this project I demonstrated my ability to teach math content through a social justice lens.
Percents
This project is a project based unit that asks students to plan a trip to Disney while incorporating math concepts on percentages. This focuses on many life skills such as time management, decision making, and budgeting. In creating this project I came to a greater understanding of how math is incorporated in daily life experiences. In this project I demonstrated my ability to incorporate a real world context to support the application of math outside of the classroom.