Weekly Reflection #3 EDTL230.2008.M008

So this past class we shared our All-About Me PowerPoints. The funny thing is that I think I may actually consider using that PowerPoint at a future open house. It does seem like using PowerPoint to introduce yourself would be interesting, as long as you were engaging and lively as a speaker as well. This week we learned mainly about how to design and plan out your technology-enhanced education. The group who shared chapter two with us talked mainly about how you formulate a lesson plan. They talked about the Design, Plan, Act formula for making lesson plans. I thought this seemed like a lot of common sense, but on the other hand it’s always good to keep people refreshed lest they forget, myself included. I already knew about performance objectives and lesson planning from my EDHD 201 course last week, but I enjoyed the way the group presented it, meaning that I wasn’t bored during their presentation. I feel as though many of my lessons can be broken down into simple performance objectives. For example, “After today’s lesson, students will be able to use definite integrals to calculate the area under a given curve in R2 on a graph with at least 90% accuracy.” So this week’s lesson basically got me thinking a lot about how I’m going to plan out certain lessons in a computer lab (if my school has one) and what kind of software would be available. I’m also at an advantage being a math teacher, especially if I’m teaching calculus, because the TI-series of graphing calculators are a great way to integrate technology into the classroom. You can purchase viewers so that the screen can be projected onto an overhead, or you can hook them up directly to computers and show them that way. I’m now thinking quite a bit about how I can use my lesson plans to integrate technology, appeal to multiple learning styles, and engage my students in order to pass on a little bit of the joy I experience from math to them.