Hello and welcome back to my week 5 maths blog. This week we looked at how to integrate technology into our classroom!

In-class Discussion:

Technology is a wonderful thing and is now a crucial aspect for 21st-century learners and educators!
Here is a quick video that helps show how we can use technology in the classroom!




One of the biggest takeaways I took from this class was the SAMR model and how it something we should practice when trying to implement technology into a classroom. Here are two videos, one video describes what the SAMR model is and one shows how to use it in a math classroom.





As educators, we should be using technology to help students create pieces that were not possible with just paper. Previous placements I feel like this was not the case most of the time - I felt like the school was just substituting paper with a Chromebook. The question that should follow that is "so what?" Okay, that is awesome you are using the technology but students are only using like 5% of that technology's potential. The best use of technology I have seen in my past placements were using it to differentiate for students. Google Speech-to-Text was what all schools are using and with the recent development of Microsoft Immersive Reader, we see educators differentiate even more. As new educators, we are striving to include technology even more with the development of our units and lesson plans.

Online Discussion

   This week's math mindset module looked at making sense, represent and understand ideas for mathematics. One of the biggest movements in math has been representing math visually. In past placements, I have seen teachers use arrays to help show math - though it was not for all students it is a good practice for UDL. Here is a quick video showing off arrays!



Strategies such as arrays help the student understand math - helps them make sense of the question; like last week's math blog when discussing "18x5". We push more and more for students to understand the main ideas of math. Some teachers resort to ideas such as arrays while others think the traditional "drill to kill" method is the way students will learn the key ideas of math. It comes down to your school classroom and what they respond to the best too. I have seen both be effective to students but I have also seen some students not respond well to the techniques. It comes down to use trying new strategies that fit best well for our students and make sure they understand the concept of mathematics.

Webinar 

This week's webinar focused on Financial Literacy. This is huge and I think most educators, me included, do not utilize the document enough or implement it when developing a lesson. This was a great webinar and I learned a lot from it. It made me go to YouTube and other websites to look at videos and research on how to integrate it more into lessons (not just in math). EduGains has a great resource to help educators implement Financial Literacy into lessons (http://www.edugains.ca/newsite/financialLiteracy/teachinglearningexamples.html).

Last week is the last blog post!