Manipulative Blog

1. How do you hold all children accountable when you're using manipulatives for an activity?

All children can be hold accountable by giving them their own manipulatives to have in front of them. When children need to get manipulatives you can have them come up to the class by groups or seating and have students take all of the manipulatives for their group. At the end of the activity you can have students put away their manipulatives. If students have their own manipulatives and the teacher tells them to put away their manipulative they have the responsibility of putting their manipulative away. By having this procedure and expectations in the classroom the teacher is holding all students accountable.

2. Why do people say not hands on they now say hands on minds on?

I think that people have changed the saying because before when they would say hands on students would just be playing with the manipulatives. It is important that students have their minds on so that they are understanding the concepts that the teacher is trying to get across. In order for teachers to do this I think they should allow the students some times to get used to the manipulatives before they start teaching because if you do not let the students play around with the manipulatives, the whole time you are trying to teach the students will be playing with them and not listening to the points you are trying to make.

3. How do process standards fit with the manipulatives?

The manipulatives connect with all of the process standards. They stand for representation because each manipulative is representing some kind of concept. When students use manipulatives they are using communication whether it is with other students or the teacher. It does not have to even be verbal they might be writing something about a manipulative. Students are consistently making connections when using manipulatives, they might be learning new concepts and connecting it to prior knowledge. Teachers can also use manipulatives to reason and proof. The manipulatives could be used to prove a theory or new concept that a teacher is teaching in class. The manipulatives also could be used to problem solve. An example of this is that chippies could be used to represent an equation and they have to solve the problem using the chippies.

Reflection on Errors.

The errors were very interesting to do in class. I learned a lot because I have never thought about looking at students work before and trying to figure out a pattern in what they are doing wrong. This was the first class in my college career that has done that and I think that it should be done in other classes as well. It's important to see where your students are missing something or not doing something right. It is a teachers job to help their students learn new concepts first you have to look at the problem in their shoes to see what they are seeing and how they are looking at the problem I liked doing these in class it was very helpful to look at the different mistakes that students were making. There were some errors that I could not figure out and my group members had to help me and talk me through it. Sometimes I might need to ask other teachers to look at a students work when I am a teacher if I cannot figure out the pattern of the work that a student has. I think analyzing student work is very important and doing it in this class really helped me.

The errors also went along with the presentations that we did in class where we had to figure out how to grade the students work. This was really hard and frustrating but I feel that my group and I decided on the right way to classify their answer. It still took a lot of analyzation on all of the students work that they were doing, which is why I think that this activity also went along with the errors. Analyzing students work is vital to being a teacher and I think both of these activities were extremely helpful in preparing us to do that.

Technology Blog

There were many times that we used technology throughout this class. Computers were the main piece of technology that we used both inside class and outside of class. This course was basically a hybrid course because we spent so much time on the computer. I have never done anything with a wiki or a google doc before and I really liked doing those in this class. I have now started doing google docs in my other classes because it makes group projects so much easier since you do not have to find a time to meet. It allows you to work on it separately even though you are not meeting together. We used the forums on sakai and emails to communicate with each other and to send in assignments. There were many other computer programs used in this class like Microsoft word, excel, powerpoint, inspiration, geometers sketchpad and panopto. The NCTM website was a very helpful website and I really enjoyed reading the articles on there because I learned a lot from them.

In the actual classroom the smartboard was another piece of technology used. I have never used a smartboard before and after using it in this class I really want one. It is a tool that is interactive with the students and seemed to make teaching a lot easier. I liked that students can just write on it like it was a chalk board I thought that was so cool. There was also a camera that we used one day in class. This camera was a really neat piece of technology that we had in the classroom. I was trying to think of ways that this could be used in the math classroom other than the number line activity. We could have also used this for the measuring with a non-standard tool activity. It would have been interesting to watch everyone go around the classroom measuring the different objects. Calculators were another tool that was used in the classroom that is technology. We did a calculator activity in class and I have never used a calculator that was not graphic that could do all of those different types of problems.

April Journal Articles