Integrating Technology Into the Math Curriculum

The challenge this year is to integrate technology into the math curriculum. It seems harder for teachers to integrate math and technology. It dawned on me the other day as to why when a teacher ask "What am I suppose to do throw out the textbook?" Good reading teachers learned long ago you don't have to use just the textbook to teach reading. They pull resources from everywhere-novels, magazines, newspapers, websites and etc. However, that's not been the norm for the math curriculum. Most math teachers follow the textbook exactly; with the exception of skipping around in the book to get the curriculum taught by state assessment time.

This made the light bulb come on for me. Why don't we teach math like we do other subjects. There is math in our daily newspapers, shopping carts, and households. It is a given that math and science go hand-in-hand; many teachers do teach math as part of the science curriculum. If you don't, that is a great place to start extending the math curriculum.

My friend MacMare and I created a wiki related to one math topic-the metric system. This is a beginning for some teachers to integrate technology into the math curriculum. http://metricssixth.wikispaces.com/ Along with the wiki, I have created Moodle courses on fractions and problem solving. It's a start. Hopefully, teachers will begin to use technology as part of the regular math routine; as well, as begin to integrate math and technology into project base learning units.

New School Year, New Job, New Responsibilities

I'm off on a new technology adventure this year. I am now a Technology Rich Classroom (TRC) Facilitator. That means I go into the classroom and help teachers integrate technology into their curriculum. In addition, I help them find resources.

This year I will try to focus more on integrating technology into the math curriculum.
To get started here's a great website for my readers. Enjoy it!

http://www.jmathpage.com/

Cyber Bullying and Online Safety

I am now a cyber bullying and online safety trainer now. If you would like for me to come to your school and give a presentation to your students on this topic leave me a comment.

Skype

One of the final activities we did this year was skype with our epals in Indiana. This was our first skype experience as a whole class. To prepare for it I skyped the teacher the day before to make sure everything was going to work.

Students began the session by introducing themselves to their epal partner. Then they discussed the novel "Sign of the Beaver." From there the discussion evolved into the students sharing information about their home states. Students learned a lot about each other and the regions we live in.

If I had this to do over again, I would have students skype earlier in the year so they could see their epals face to face.

Adding A Little Twist To An Old Experiment

Most of you have probably heard of or done the egg drop experiment with your class. You know the one-students design a container to protect an egg when dropped from a high place.

To introduce this investigation, I found several excellent video clips of the experiment on youtube.com. Here is one of the videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb1uduZcvY4
I shared this video with my class; then let them design their own investigation.

As students dropped the eggs, I had other classmates take pictures of them with the digital cameras.

The new twist was integrating the technology. Not all technology integration has to be a huge event.

Make a Smilebox photobook

Design A New Classroom

Now that the year is almost over, we can have a little fun. However, I always want them to continue learning; so one activity we did was "Design A New Classroom."

I had students measure the area of our classroom, desk, cabinets, closet, door ways, windows, the sink and anything else that I could think of. Then they drew a picture of their desired classroom to scale on graph paper using the dimensions of the items they measured. Next, they used the internet and catalogs to look up the prices of everything. They put the data into a Numbers Document and calculated the cost of their model classroom.

For fun students used cardboard or foam to create their version of the model classroom to scale. This part students found fun and challenging. Since it was the end of the year this was a good activity to review math skills we learned while having fun creating a model. It took students several days to complete the activity. They were astounded when they discovered the actual price of these model classroom.

Webquest

During our last chapter of the social studies textbook, students used the following webquest to learn about the Underground Railroad. http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/ath/library/webquests/underground/default.htm

When students finished the webquest, they shared their keynotes with the rest of the class. It was one of the few times this year I let the class view each individual keynote with the whole group at one time. Usually to share or celebrate a finished product, the class did a Walk About Review.

During a Walk About Review, students sit their computers on top of their desk while students strolled quietly from computer to computer observing the work of their peers. This type of sharing is much quicker then watching 23 keynotes or projects for an entire afternoon. It still allowed the class celebration time.

What's 5th grade doing now?

Now that state assessments are over, it is time to continue our learning and have fun. Over the last week students have made a keynote about their favorite book that they have read this year. They are recording their voices in this keynote which is something new for them. It is harder to record your voice in keynote because you can't cut out mistakes like you can in Garageband. However, students have created some beautiful products. We will share our work with the rest of the school by displaying our keynotes on Obee T.V.

Also, we are using Pages to create a response journal for the book Holes. In addition, we created a chart using Pages to record literary devices as we read.