Blog Post #6 - Week 11

Hey everyone! Thank you so much for following along with my math blog all these weeks! It has been a blast sharing my thoughts about math and what I have learned in my math course with all of you! This blog has allowed me to reflect deeply on teaching math and increase my understanding and confidence in my abilities as a teacher candidate. Unfortunately, this is my final blog post, so I hope you enjoy it and thanks for coming along for the ride with me!

This week in-class we shared math games that we had been playing and analyzing in smaller groups by presenting the ones we liked the best to our entire class. I really liked this activity because math can be a subject that is difficult to make relatable or engaging to students if you are always teaching it to them with a pen and paper. By implementing technology and math video games, you can not only show them how math can be engaging and fun, but you are also showing them how math can be fun and practical in their everyday life. I would like to now share some of my thoughts on some of the video games we shared as a class and share my thoughts on how I could incorporate them into classrooms.

Arcademics. Screenshot from Canoe Penguins. arcademics.com. Accessed November 19, 2019. https://www.arcademics.com/games/canoe-penguins

Quite a few of the games shared were from websites like Arcademics or mathplayground. While these games are fun and engaging for a short while, I feel like they lose their lustre quickly and they are not very strong at motivating students to continue playing and completing math work. The main reason I think this is because they are mostly very simple games mechanics-wise they all follow the same pattern of answer a math question and then your character moves forward a little bit in some form of race. While these simple games might work well at motivating younger students in the primary grades, I believe they fall short of being truly effective with junior and intermediate students. In today’s world where the games students play at home for fun have expansive worlds, multiple characters, problems to solve, and agency for the player; these simple design math games are not engaging enough. That is why I believe that games like mPower, Dreambox and Prodigy are the ones that I would try and implement with students.

TVO. mPower. orion.on.ca. Retrieved November 19, 2019. https://www.orion.on.ca/news-events/blog/free-digital-tools-from-tvo-to-improve-learning-at-your-school/attachment/tvo-mpower-900px/

mPower, Dreambox and Prodigy are effective because they are engaging enough to rival the video games that children play at home. This is because they have large worlds with multiple minigames, and they include some form of player agency. On top of that, they each come with a teacher portal where you as the teacher can track student performance and even send students specific lessons that you want them to work on! I could see myself implementing any of these three games into my teaching practice as a way for students to review concepts taught in class and for a way for them to continue having fun while learning math!

Check out this video about Prodigy below! Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=A0CtplncQnU&feature=emb_logo

Thank you so much for following me on this journey! I hope you enjoyed my blog posts and I wish the best in all of your endeavours! Goodbye!

Blog Post #5 - Week 9

Hi everyone!! Thank you so much for returning to my math blog once again this week!! I learned lots of math in these past two weeks through our textbook and our lectures! I am very excited to share what I have learned while adding my own thoughts and opinions to them as well! So, let’s get started!

I am really intrigued by the van Hiele taxonomy of geometric thinking that we read about and then had a good discussion about in class. The van Hiele taxonomy breaks geometric thinking into 5 distinct levels: Level 0: Visualization, Level 1: Analysis, Level 2: Informal Deduction, Level 3: Deduction, and Level 4: Rigour. Click here for a brief article that provides even more detail about the van Hiele levels to deepen your understanding! These levels interest me quite a lot because they provide a framework from which a teacher can work. By identifying what level of the van Hiele taxonomy a student is in, a teacher then has a reference to determine what that student knows and what thinking rationale they use; without the taxonomy, a teacher would be forced to guess their students’ level of thinking for each geometric subsection. As a teacher candidate, I am glad that I have learned about this taxonomy because I believe it will be of great use when I am teaching because it will make it so much easier for me to identify the level of my students so that I can better serve them. It is important for educators to remember that a student’s spatial experiences, not age, determine their position in the taxonomy which reinforces our importance as teachers to guide them through the levels to be where they need to be. I also had some fun thinking back to when I was a student and what levels of the taxonomy I would have been at when I was a student. I wonder now that I have not been in intensive math courses for a few years if I have lost some of my touch and would now only be at level 3 😊!

Vojkuvkova. van Hiele Level 0. Proceedings of Contributed Papers. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.mff.cuni.cz/veda/konference/wds/proc/pdf12/WDS12_112_m8_Vojkuvkova.pdf

Vojkuvkova. van Hiele Level 2. Proceedings of Contributed Papers. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.mff.cuni.cz/veda/konference/wds/proc/pdf12/WDS12_112_m8_Vojkuvkova.pdf

Over the last two weeks in class, we have begun discussing lesson planning in math and how it should look. I am looking forward to working through and completing our lesson plan assignment because I feel like it is the next step that I need to take in order to become an effective math teacher. I think it is crucially important for a math teacher to practice and implement universal design. This way all the learners in a class’ needs can be addressed and everyone can be on the same path of learning. The needs for every math problem and lesson that we discussed align very well with the universal framework. We discussed how a lesson needs variable entry points for learners of all abilities, a low floor and high ceiling so it meets students where they are and offers room for growth, and a lesson much be engaging for all students. I am excited to implement each of these into my own lesson plans!

Margaret Flood. Universal Design for Learning. wtc.ie. Accessed November 9, 2019. https://www.wtc.ie/cpd-courses/post-primary-courses/1109-post-primary-universal-design-for-learning-udl.html

Thanks for reading! See you next week!