The Designer

Joel Amidon, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at The University of Mississippi. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His specialization is in mathematics education and the improvement of pedagogy to address issues of equity and diversity. Simply put, his aim is to lead people to love others through mathematics education.

His work as a LessonSketch Research & Development Fellow has led him to design experiences to help pre-service teachers consider what teaching mathematics as an act of unconditional love may look like.

Follow Joel on his website - http://amidonplanet.com, or Twitter - @amidonplanet.

The Project

LessonSketch is a multimedia platform that enables teachers and other human service professionals to represent, examine, share, and discuss their own practices, as well as the practices of other members of their profession. LessonSketch makes it easy for users to learn from representations of practice by hosting artifacts such as videos or student work in private or public forums for viewing, annotation, and discussion, and also allows users to create their own representations of practice in the form of storyboards depicting both exemplary and routine scenarios.

Advanced users have access to a full suite of authoring tools, including highly customizable annotation environments and forum discussions centered around these artifacts, allowing them to create opportunities for their fellow practitioners to learn from the experiences and perspectives of others.

The mathematics teacher education module represented on this site has been developed in part with the support of National Science Foundation Grant DRL-1316241. All opinions represented on this site and in that module are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Foundation.

The experiences and depictions created for this module were done on the LessonSketch platform. All the graphics in the LessonSketch platform are © 2015 The Regents of the University of Michigan. Figures taken from the platform for illustrative purposes on this website are used with permission.