Final Field Project Update

I was able to complete one blog activity with the students at Easton Area High School. The result and student participation was great. They had a lot of fun. You can see some of the comments they made on www.calculusproject.wordpress.com.

Overall, I was very impressed with the work they posted as well as the work they submitted for grading. Some students couldn’t fathom the idea of how Euler was able to compute mathematical facts without any technology. Some students also wanted to know where e was used in real life. This seems to be an area of mathematics where they hunger for. Application of mathematical concepts are very important to the understanding and conceptualizing of “abstract” symbols.

Project Update

I have set up the blog for the students in Ms. Ciambron’e class in order for them to communicate. You can view it at www.calculusproject.wordpress.com.

When I went to visit the classes, they were very excited about the task at hand. Some thought it would be a great idead to incoporate blogs in other classes.

Podcast#2: What’s the project all about?

Field Project (Preliminary)

Podcast

Natural Numeral System

Project Changes

I’ve decided to work with a teacher from the Easton Area High School. The reason for this is due to the many obstacles I was facing with the elementary students. Although the teachers were excited about the project, I foresee myself spending more time training the students and the teachers than actually being on task. I don’t think that my project (as stated) is feasible to do in a semester long. Due to schedule and work conflicts a semester is not a sufficient enough time to implement the project. And besides the training part of this was going to take too much time.

At EASD the teacher already uses the graphing calculator and she has activities for the students. I will be bringing my own designed activities and we will compare. I think this should be a smooth transition. I am looking forward to meeting her next week.

Project Progress

I have contacted a fifth grade class teacher at Marvine Elementary School in Bethlehem. I have an appointment tomorrow to meet with the teacher. Check later for another update.

Hello world!

Field Placement Process

I have access to elementary schools in Bethlehem and Allentown. If anyone is interested in working with a multicultural group of students, I know teachers who are willing to get some help at Marvine Elementary as well as Donegan Elementary, both in Bethlehem. In Allentown, I have connections with McKinley Elementary.

Suggestion of classroom teachers

Meeting the teachers and asking their input on how to improve mathematics awareness.

Getting to know the students’ strengths and weaknesses with technology.

Digital divide can be a challenge as many students may not have access to a computer/internet outside of school.

Does the school have and “open lab” concept or computer time where the students can access the blog/wiki to post their solutions.

Brainstorming

I would like to introduce some sort of technical blog or wiki dealing with the TI-15 — the calculator that is predominantly used in the mathematics curriculum at the elementary level.

Rationale for the blog/wiki: Due to the amount of instruction time in various content areas, very little time (if any) is devoted to teaching how to use the calculators effectively.

In this blog I envision a teacher posting some kind of (bi)weekly calculator activity with instructions so that the students would complete and post their results. As students post solutions to the activity the teacher would monitor and provide feedback to their posts. Solutions to the activity would be posted and students solution corrected.

Disclaimer

I understand how busy elementary teachers are, but this blog/wiki could be somehow incorporated as part of the mathematics curriculum. Therefore, communicating with the teacher would be helpful. I would model the blog/wiki communication for the fisrt few posts so that the teacher feel comfortable with the task at hand.