Author Archives: gursimran kaur

Icing on the top

It seems difficult to be able to list all the good use of digital technology in the math classroom, as I used digital technology in my classroom on a regular basis. Digital technology can help you not only with delivering the content to your class but it could be very useful for the formative and summative assessment. In addition to the above, I have used digital technology as a tool for my students to be able to express their knowledge in a project that uses digital technology. Overall, I think it will be fair to say that a good use of digital technology in the math classroom is to use it as the icing on the top of a cake. The cake is the teacher’s teaching methods and the delivery of the content but what makes this cake even more tempting is the use of digital technology in a classroom. When students tend to get bored with the paper/pen teaching and learning style, a teacher can perk it up with the use of technology with a very little effort on the teacher’s part and it goes a long way. One of the examples that a good use of digital technology might look like is students feeling comfortable to use their personal devices or borrowing pads form the teacher to be a part of the classroom activities. This environment not only perks things up but also creates a social environment where students can interact with each other without having to know each other. For example, the Kahoot game is an online quiz game that requires students to participate via a digital technology device that requires them to log in online. In this game, students compete against each other and the results of the competition are posted after every question of the game. This creates an atmosphere where students are seen interacting with some students that they wouldn’t if it weren’t for the game. They would interact with them just because they are so close to beating each other in the game. Technology can help address the conceptual challenge that I talked about in my previous post of students not being able to “let go”. Students require a repetitive reminder of certain concepts to help them get rid of their conceptions and digital technology is one of the best tools to do that. Because by using digital technology it becomes easier to repeat an activity with students instead of wasting paper and also making changes to the existing Kahoot game will not be so hard.

 

I have been using digital technology to fill the gaps in my teaching and students learning throughout my teaching career and it has been working great. Students seem to be more interested in listening to you if there is technology involved. I have found that digital technology helps you mask the “boringness” of some of the hard concepts that are taught in a math classroom. This vision of using technology as a tool for assessment and content delivery is very much possible and I have used it throughout my teaching career.

“Letting Go”

One of the challenges that Heather faces in the video, “The Private Universe” is of her not being able to let go of the “theory of bouncing light”. This is mentioned towards the end of the video where Heather seems to have understood the rest of the concept of Earth’s revolution but still holds onto her “theory of bouncing light” that determines the season of the year. I found this part very interesting that she is not able to “let go” of her existing conception, however, she was provided knowledge on this concept and was expected to understand why the seasons change. I think the underlying factor behind any conceptual challenge is to not be able to “let go” of the conception even after you have been exposed to the reality or the truth.

Similarly, I encountered some similar tendencies of not being able to “let go” of conceptions that some of my grade 8 students had when I taught the exponents unit last year. The product rule says if there is the same base with exponents, it is equivalent to the base with the powers added together. Now, my students create their own knowledge about multiplying the powers when two same bases are being added together with powers, without my interference. According to Confrey, a conception is when, “children develop ideas about their world, develop meanings for words used in science, and develop strategies to obtain explanations for how and why things behave as they do” (Confrey, 1990, p. 3).  My grade 8 children developed a strategy to solve the addition of exponents based on their knowledge of multiplication of exponents and no matter how hard I tried, they will not “let go” of the new understanding that they have created for themselves.

Although analyzing Heather’s “theory of bouncing light” further, I also think that it might just be a result of creating explanation when asked a question on the spot. “We assume that mental model is a dynamic structure which is created on the spot for the purpose of answering questions, solving problems, or dealing with other situations” (Vosniadou, 1992, p. 543). I think it is up to the teacher to avoid situations like this with their students where they feel compelled to create their own theories on the spot because they do not have enough background information on it. In the article, Tracking Decimal Misconceptions by Linda B. Griffin, there are some key points that could be beneficial for teachers who find themselves surrounded by students who either would not “let go” of their existing conceptions or make new conceptions because they are put on the spot. One of the key findings in this article is to make connections with what students already know. Instead of giving students pieces of information and leaving it up to them to make connections, these connections should be made by the teacher when teaching material by activating the previous knowledge. In addition to the above, a teacher might want to break the unit in pieces and do a formative assessment before moving on. Technolgy comes in really handy when doing a formative assessment as a quick check before moving on to the unit, such as Kahoot, online jeopardy and other quiz games.

 

Confrey, J. (1990). A review of the research on student conceptions in mathematics, science, and programming. Review of research in education, 16, 3-56.

Vosniadou, S., & Brewer, W. F. (1992). Mental models of the earth: A study of conceptual change in childhood. Cognitive psychology, 24(4), 535-585.

www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/pdf/10.5951/teacchilmath.22.8.0488.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:681cc559288870a5c054a75882626988.

PCK= TPCK

Since I just finished my teaching degree 2 years ago, I still have my practicum experience fresh in my memory. I remember that my faculty advisor was always encouraging me towards using technology in my classroom along, whereas my school advisor was not a big fan of technology use in a math classroom. I was always a big fan of using PCK in my classroom and felt a bit uncomfortable using TPACK (whenever I used it). Reflecting back on the experience now, I still cannot pinpoint why I was not comfortable using TPACK in my classroom, even though I consider myself technology-friendly compared to most people.

One of the instances I remember using PCK in my class was to give an introduction to the unit of Volume for my grade 8 students. I came up with a story where a crow is thirsty and is flying around looking for some water. He finally comes across this beaker that has some water but the crow cannot reach the water as it is at the bottom of the beaker. The crow comes up with an idea and starts collecting small rocks that he throws into the beaker. Eventually, after throwing a couple dozen rocks into the beaker, the water level rises in the beaker and the crow drinks water and flies away. I remember asking my students why they think the water level rose after the crow threw rocks in it. I had a few students come up with the right answer, that was that the volume of the beaker rose as the rocks were added and water level became higher. I consider this lesson of my practicum one of the best lessons as students were able to understand the concept of volume without me having to give them the textbook definition of what volume is. I remember being very pleased with this lesson by the end of the class, where my faculty advisor was observing me. I sat down with my advisor to go over the lessons’ strengths and weaknesses and the first thing he told me was that the lesson would have been better if I incorporated some technology in it. I was hurt by this comment as I was confident that my lessons went great and the PCK fulfilled the purpose of the lesson, therefore, why should there be TPCK when PCK is doing the job right.

After this, I realized that sometimes my advisor would ask me to include technology in my PCK teaching just because it is the “cool” thing to do. I think if I have to answer the question I asked myself earlier that why do I prefer PCK over TPCK, it would be that maybe because it was being forced on me. I was doing a good job using PCK but was seen as not good enough just because the technology was not a part of my PCK.

As Shulman states, “Isn’t teaching little more than personal style, artful communication, knowing some subject matter, and applying the results of recent research on teaching effectiveness?” (Shulman, 1987, p. 5). I personally believe that teaching isn’t any more than personal style, artful communication, knowing some subject matter and applying the results of recent research on teaching effectiveness. Teaching requires a teacher to be personally comfortable with whatever pedagogy they are keen to apply in their classroom instead of being forced by the administration that you must use technology or any other enhancement in one’s classroom. I did use a lot of TPCK in my classroom throughout my teaching experience but there are certain topics and concepts that are well taught without technology and some that are taught better with technology.

 

Shulman, L.S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching. The foundations of a new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1)1-23.

“Irreplaceable” medium of daily life- Technology

Feenburg’s definition of technology is what resonated the most with me. I think calling technology “the medium of daily life in modern societies” is the most appropriate definition of technology since technology really is the medium of our daily lives. From the moment, we wake up in the morning with an alarm clock or phone ringing by our bedside to the time we go to bed at night reading a book on our iPad or replying to emails on our computer, technology has become the medium of our daily lives. For an educator, technology is the “future” that has become the “present” for us. Both of my parents being educators, I always overheard things such as, “I wish we could keep a record of each step a student takes to get to the solution without having to do one-on-one interviews with them”. And then they would say to each other, “maybe in the “future” when there is better technology”. Now is the “future” they all had been waiting for. A student can be a part of an online workplace where they will have to justify each step they take in order to get to the solution that the teacher will have access to. Technology has done groundbreaking work when it comes to teachers being able to read a child’s mind and see where the learning gaps are. Therefore, technology is not only “the medium of daily life” but it is the irreplaceable medium of daily life in modern societies.

 

Designers of learning experiences should first of all be aware of what do students struggle with the most in a classroom. Students that struggle with staying focused on a task in a classroom will have a different design of TELE whereas; if a class is full of well-behaved students and requires help with students being able to get a deeper understanding of concepts, that will require a different design of TELE. My design of TELE would include testing students’ ability to use the given technology and only if all students are comfortable, then adding that to my design of TELE. I would also make sure that my design of TELE is not being forced on each student. Every student learns in a different way and perhaps the technology-enhanced learning experience may not be the best way to learn a concept for every student. My design for TELE will include an option where students are given the choice to either use TELE or learn the way they feel that is most useful for them.

Are we losing to technology?

Keywords: Dilemma, Flip-classroom, Challenging

I decided to interview my sponsor teacher from my practicum two years ago. The reason why I decided to interview her was that she was the only teacher who I had seen using the “flip-classroom” teaching technique with her students in my two years of teaching/pre-service teaching experience. I am going to refer to her as Ms. P in the rest of my post. Ms. P has a Master’s degree in math education and has been teaching for over 15 years as a math teacher at a high school in Delta. She has been the head of the math department at her current school for about 5 years. I admired her teaching style her insights in math education during our small discussions during my practicum two years ago. While I was doing my practicum, I did not get a chance to try her “flip-classroom” teaching technique but I remember observing a few of her classes. Just to give some background on “flip-classroom” teaching technique, it is a teaching technique that has been known to be present for a little while. Students are asked to watch videos at home online, such as Khan Academy website and others, and they get to practice their practice questions in class while they can get help from their teacher if they run into a problem. While students are working on practice problems in class, they also use their phones and other devices to look at the videos they were to watch for homework at home, just to review some of the concepts.

 

I asked Ms. P if I could come in to interview her about her teaching technique and the how technology plays a grand role in this certain teaching technique. I met with her earlier this week and she gave me her whole 45 minutes of her lunchtime which I cannot thank her enough for. We decided to sit in her classroom while there were students dropping by to re-write a test or drop off an assignment or two.

 

As I asked Ms. P my first question about her experience with technology, she started laughing and told me that she is not the right person to talk about technology in a math classroom. I asked her why and she said she tried doing things “differently” for a year but technology seems to “win” every time. I still remember her stressing on these words in her explanation on why she was not the right person for this interview, “different” and “technology seems to win”, which I will get back to later. As I assured her that she still is the right person for this interview as she can share things that she has learned during her experience with her teaching techniques that involved technology.

 

As we got started, she started by praising whoever came up with the idea of flip-classroom teaching technique and how it is a brilliant idea to enhance student learning. The main reason why she thinks it’s a great teaching technique is that it gives her the whole class time to work with students one-on-one on problems that they may come across. She gets to see students struggle and learn and achieve all at the same time. All of that was possible because her students were doing their “classwork” at home where they were watching online videos, either prepared by Ms. P through YouTube or some other sources such as Khan Academy. Ms. P suggested that when she started this new teaching technique, she was very excited about it and so were the students. In the beginning, everything was great and most students were watching videos at home and working on problems in class and asking her questions to get the help they needed. However, she said it did not last long. I was interested to know why it did not work in the long run. Ms. P said that students started to start falling behind, more and more students came to class unprepared. They would either forget to watch their videos the night before class or they would go to the computer to watch the videos but get distracted instead and do other things. She said that this resulted in students not being able to do any of the practice questions during class and hence not ask questions to get help from Ms. P. She said as much as she was excited at the start of this teaching technique, it seemed to have fallen apart.

 

Ms. P said that she kept this going for the whole year just to be consistent with her class but decided that it was not going to work as it was difficult to make sure that all students watched their videos before coming to class. At this point, as much as I wanted to ask the rest of the questions on my question list, I wanted to know more about this certain situation. I was curious to know what she thought as a solution in the result of this situation. Ms. P suggested that the only solution she could think of was to go back to the traditional way of teaching. I asked her to explain why she thought that might be the solution as she could make some changes to her teaching technique and still continue with “flip-classroom” setting. She said that she wanted to keep teaching that way where students learned the information on their own at their own pace and asked me for help in person on whatever they did not understand. However, she said she could not trust her students with technology anymore. I was a little surprised by the statement she had made about technology. She suggested that technology has a lot to offer to us but teenagers and technology cannot be put together in an educational setting as there are way too many distractions. We ended the conversation by talking about if she is using technology in her current classroom setting in any form and she suggested she uses it for research or computational purposes but it is not a big part of her classroom. I thanked her from the bottom of my heart for giving me her time and sharing her experience with me and left with a lot of questions on my mind.

 

One of the main questions I had left this interview was, is Ms. P right about the distractions that technology brings with it can be the reason to step away from technology in an educational setting? I also wanted to think about two of the words she said at the beginning of the interview, “different” and that “technology seems to win”. I think when she said she wanted to do something different, she meant that trying technology is still out of the norm in our educational system. Majority of our classrooms are mostly based on traditional learning/ teaching styles. “Technology seems to win” was still bothering me as it was portraying technology as the culprit in the situation, which it is not. Ms. P’s teaching style did not work because her students did not have enough motivation to keep up with their homework and be consistent on watching videos at home every night, technology is not to be blamed here, in my opinion. Technology has a lot to offer to us if we learn how to use it in the right way and encourage our students to take use it in the same way, only then can “technology win”.

 

Case 2 & 4

I chose to analyze case 2 and case 4

Case 2: I found this case to be the most interesting of all for me because a) I am a math teacher myself and can relate to the content being discussed and b) because I have always been undecided whenever someone brought up the “allow calculators / don’t allow calculators” debate.

This video shows a passionate math teacher who has been teaching high school math for decades. He seems to be in the favor of using calculators in his math classroom unlike some math teachers out there who will not allow students to bring a calculator to class.

I think that the good use of technology in a math/science classroom is a) to make learning relevant to the current generation and b) to make learning efficient. I noticed that this teacher is achieving both of these goals by using the calculators in his classroom. As the teacher mentions towards the end of the video, the male students have poor work ethic compared to female students and when male students are given graphing calculators they tend to play around with them and figure out the problems. Therefore, the teacher is using the technology to making learning relevant for these students. This teacher is also making learning efficient for some of these students as they don’t do any work on the paper that saves them time that the teenagers would rather spend on other things than writing 20 math equations on a piece of paper. Students can simply plug in the value into the calculator and it gives them the image on the screen. Hence, the learning is made efficient by the teacher.

Drawbacks/issues: Some of the issues that came to my attention while watching these videos were: a) How old are these videos? I am guessing these cannot be very recent as it has been known that students can store a lot of data in their graphing calculators that can be used later in the tests. I am guessing these videos were made before it was discovered that they can store data.

b) The main issue I see arising, in this case, is that technology is improving and changing every day. There is always better technology out there every year. Does this mean that this teacher will have to invest money in new technology every year? Will he continue to use the old technology because it does the job? Instead of investing into calculators, which definitely seems like the right choice at this point as they are 1/10th of the cost of a computer, invest into computers where a new software or a program can be downloaded when available to help support students. Otherwise, technology can go out of date very quickly and lose its appeal to students to create relevance or making learning effiencent.

Case 4: I decided to look into case 4 as I was interested in knowing how can one use technology in a biology classroom, although there was not much offered in the video about that. However, it was interesting to hear pre-service teacher perspective on the matter of teaching technology in a science classroom.

One of the main issues I understand that came up while I was watching these videos was that the teacher was asked how does technology enhance learning in a biology classroom. And the answer that the teacher gave to this question was a bit problematic for me. He said,  “use of technology does not significantly increase their achievement, but it didn’t hurt them either”. We cannot be spending time, effort and money on resources and strategies in our classrooms that are only incorporated in lessons just because they don’t help students but they don’t hurt them either. We should only use technology if it enhances student learning or even enhances half of the students’ learning in the classroom. Like in case 2, mostly male students are attracted to the idea of using calculators more than girls as they like to play with technology. I believe that before introducing anything new in your classroom, you must make the benefits of this change clear to your students. Therefore, they understand the importance of it and can benefit from it.

Gursimran Kaur

 

Fear of Computers

I was 10 years old when we got our first family computer that was put in the living room and became the center of attention for everyone who came to our house. I grew up with an older brother, who had begged my parents to buy him this computer in the first place. Before we got this computer he had some experience with computers as he used to go to his friends’ house and use computers for games and web surfing purposes.

I was always the sheltered younger sibling who did not know much about computers. The day when we got our first computer, my brother got help from his friends to set it up and they spent hours on the computer just setting it up and then doing different things on it. I was watching from far, waiting for my turn to use the computer. My parents did not know much about computers either so they decided to let my brother take the lead on everything when it came to the new computer at our house. After spending a few hours with his friends on the computer, my brother decided to go for a walk with his friends. I thought this was my chance to take a look at what it really was. I had seen my brother use the PC start button to turn it on, so I pressed it and it turned on. I double clicked on a few things on the desktop and drew a few things on paint and realized it was time for my brother to get back home. This is when I realized that I only knew how to turn it on but did not know how to turn it off. I remembered my brother did something with the mouse to turn it off and didn’t use the PC start button to turn it off. As I started to panic, trying to remember how to turn it off, my brother came back. He yelled at me for touching the computer without his permission and turning it on and claimed that I don’t know anything about computers and would have wrecked the new computer.

This fight with my brother instilled a fear inside of that I can never learn how to use a computer. I lived with this fear up until I went to high school and got my own laptop. Only then did I realize that computer was a very useful thing and one cannot break it by just doing their work on it. However, my parents are still afraid of using the computer today.

The question this experience raises for me today is: my parents supported my brother when he yelled at me because they did not know how to use computers either, so there was this stigma that it is something new and we don’t want it to get wrecked so stay away from it. It makes me want to think:

As we celebrate the start of a new year, 2018, is digital technology still something that people of certain age fear? How can that fear be uplifted?

Newcomer: Hello Everyone!

Hello everyone!

I am a little late to join you all but glad that I am a part of this course finally. I live in Surrey, BC and am a full-time masters student at UBC. I am doing my M.A. in math education and I am taking this course as an alternative to one of the math education courses I have to take. I have never taken a MET course before, this would be my first one.

I taught for a year at a high school in Surrey after getting my education degree. I am hoping to learn different strategies on how to incorporate technology into my classroom and understand pros/cons of technology in education by the end of this semester.

I am going to try to catch-up on the discussions and assignments that I missed as soon as I can, therefore, I will be posting replies to some of you fellow’s posts.

Looking forward to working with you all for the rest of the semester and learn from everyone!