Embedded Files
Evidence: Math 1 and Statistics Websites
As stated for KS 5, this year I am in the process of developing websites for the courses that I teach. Although I do not teach an online course, I envision the end result of theses pages to be a place where very self-directed students could teach themselves the content laid out on my websites. I include relevant links, assignments, videos, articles, and other resources that I think students would find useful. I prefer this platform over our school's LMS (we use NEO) for too many reasons to list here, but the main one being control over design and outside access.
I have been sharing these sites with my colleagues and getting their input on them. Although I do not think that they are sold on the idea of creating a site for themselves, or adopting mine in their classes, they are able to see alternative ways of delivering content to students and can borrow ideas from me more readily than sorting through years worth of documents in our Google Drive.
Evidence: Twitter
Twitter plays a big role in our High School. Here’s our principal’s account:
(22.6K Tweets!)
A few years ago I thought our math department should jump in on the bandwagon and I created the account @SBMathApartment where I tweet sporadically about math events, fun things in our department, or whatever else seems interesting and I have my own account @harootintoot.
In the Fintelman post “To tweet or not to tweet,” the author acknowledges her initial hang ups with Twitter, “It’s full of links, hashtags, too much punctuation, and too few correctly spelled words, all in the name of getting as much as possible out of 140 characters,” I completely agree. There feels like there is a lot of noise to get used to before you can delve into Twitter.
After getting used to the feel of Twitter, I started following people in the field of math that I admired, and had some sort of connection to. I find that there are people who post things that I am always intrigued to learn about and I generally learn something new about my profession every time I log on.
I am not very active on the site and do not get involved in any debates, chats, or many back and forth conversations, however I have found it extremely useful in reaching out to individuals that I admire, want to have as a guest in my classroom, or bounce ideas off of. I think Twitter has been more beneficial than a lot of the conferences that I have attended as far as staying current in my field, learning new and exciting ways to teach, and finding out about educational opportunities that exist. Plus it's free, and I don't have to fill out a conference form to attend.
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