This morning as I was driving my 1 hour drive to Hafford, I had a "ping" moment. My students could take definitions from their geometry unit and with the help of a drawing program create slide images to explain these geometric concepts. I could import them into Windows Movie Maker, or just put them on a Google Docs slide show and post it in our blog.
Yesterday, I had all my students copy a portable program that cannot be named into their documents folder. This program has draw tools that can create circle pies. While the student creates them, he/she can see the exact angle of the pie in a tiny window. I wanted them to have some practice creating and measuring angles, as well as learn how to use draw tools. (Never teach anything that doesn't go with at least 3 other things I always say; it's the wardrobe planning method of instructional design...but I digress).
Today with the same program, each student created a slide and we exported them to .gif. I learned that I had to save the documents to their accounts and then copy them to the homework file, rather than saving them directly the homeowrk file.
Kids said it was the most fun they'd had in a math class. I guess I'd better not do this again. School, especially math class, is supposed to be miserable.
1 comment:
Yes, Pat, we would not want to excite or engage our students in learning. Hey, wait a minute! How to engage students has been a hot topic throughout all of my Master's classes as well as many PD events I have attended lately. Good on you for finding a meaningful and engaging way to teach math!
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