Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Started by talking about the article we read for class:
- As future teachers we need to learn about technology by using technology, not just learning about technology.
- We bring in pedagogy by exploring the technology not by creating lesson plans. We will have plenty of practice later on writing lesson plans.
- excel= a laboratory, a play ground. GSP is also like that. It's the space that we can try stuff on.
- Can excel be as useful as GSP in exploring mathematical ideas? It seems like its more of a teacher tool than a student tool
- Because we're not familiar with excel, it was hard to follow what she was doing with the excel documents.
- you really have to know what you're doing. GSP seems more user friendly.
- once you're familiar with excel, it is easy to use. There are hundreds of functions that excel can do. yes it's more complex.
- what about the students perspective rather than the teachers?
- like that it gives us faster data than paper and pencil
- learning about excel can be a basis for computer programing
- it's like a half step. yes there is a learning curve, but it's better to take a half step in high school then another half step in college, rather than a whole step in college.
- but the learning curve is really steep.
- Two kinds of ways to use excel with your students
- create the spreadsheets ahead of time, find them already made. then students don't have to create it themselves. it's an activity ready for the students to use.
- different than having students actually have to create the tasks in excel. for this students need to know more about the math and about excel.
- unless you just can't find the thing you want, you probably wont create a manipulative in excel. if you can't find what you're looking for, excel is easier to program than java or other programs.
- excel is not internet based. you don't need internet, but most computers have spreadsheets.
- but really, how often will you be teaching with a computer that doesn't have internet?
- GSP can be saved in java, so it can be used without GSP.
- on excel you can adapt what you need, rather than finding a manipulative that is already created that isn't as perfect as you want.
- hard to follow commands from the article, because we don't have experience.
- slider
- figured out how to make the scroll bar under the developer tab
- can have decimal values from the slider by creating a slider, then in another cell divide those values by a number, like 100 to get hundredths
- can set up excel to collect data. usually virtual manipulatives aren't designed to capture what you're doing
- problem with coin flipping: hard to believe that the values are actually random
- but having students flip a coin also doesn't convince them
- our idea of random is very difficult to construct
- you have to do a lot of activities to get at the idea of random
- we often use the word random when we mean arbitrary
- calculators can also do some of the things, like flipping a coin.
- excel is a place to use some mathematics to get it to do what you want it to.
State of the States
can import data
freeze unfreeze rows: select cell > window > freeze/ unfreeze
sum