Tech Tools
Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.
-Bill Gates
These are the various tech tools I utilize to further my teaching by reaching the student in more ways than just on the whiteboard.
This is a list of websites and programs that I have experience with and how they can support student learning.
My Favorites:
Desmos has a graphing calculator that students and I can utilize for graphing various shapes and functions. The more you learn about demos, the more parts you can find. It is such a versatile platform.
Desmos also has a classroom platform that allows teachers to have activities with multiple pages and can monitor students' progress in real-time. Showing their responses allows complete control of what the students are working on if needed.
This resource is a Google Slides add-on that allows you to incorporate intractivity into your slide show lessons. There is also the feature of seeing what they students are writing on their slides or how they are answering their questions on a seperate screen seen only by the teacehr.
Combines Pear Deck, Kahoot, ThinLink, Active Prompt, and much more. This is an instructional tool that has varying features that can be used to keep students attention by keeping them involved in the classroom.
Formative is a versatile web tool that can be used for student and teacher paced lesson presentation slides, quizzes and more. This resource allows for student agency, metacognitive thinking, and promotes higher order thinking with the built in math tools. Teachers can engage in student's work in real time while being able to detect certain types of plagarism.
Geogebra has a graphing calculator that allows various shapes, lines, and angles to be drawn, measured, connected, and more. This application will enable students to play with multiple situations and variations in equations similar to the desmos calculator. I can see how GeoGebra would be used to make formative quizzes to see where the students are at so that I can prepare assignments to cater the lessons to the student's needs.
Incorporating Edpuzzle in your video lectures and problems is a great way to make your videos interactive. You can import any video from Youtube or use a video that you have created. Putting a pause at any point during the video to have the students answer a multiple-choice or open-ended question and also leaving notes in there for the students to read along the way. A good idea for at-home lessons for homework or when a sub is there for the day.
More Resources:
Work collaboratively on tree maps to organize ideas. Great for brainstorming. This app is great for collaboration and communication between groups and putting together thoughts for projects.
Create interactive visual infographics for online learning. Students can make their own or teachers can make them to facilitate student learning.
Gather information about what the class understands with a single-question quiz that allows students to move a pointer onto an image indicating the answer to the question. This is a great way to know where your students are in class. It can be used as a refresher and conversation starter as well.
This application lets you type neatly formatted mathematical equations and copy them onto other sites where that is impossible. This lets students see the actual formula, so there is no confusion.
vs. a/b+c^d
These resources are great for teachers to have their grade books. What they do it allow you to see students grades and highlight those that are struggling more in order to know what students might need more help.
Create online forms, surveys, and quizzes, and create results sorted how you need. These can be used as formative assessments like exit tickets today. It can also be used as a quiz where you can have a student review a question they got wrong to provide personalized instruction.
Like Code Cogs, you can type out equations, but you can also draw shapes and personalize a complete worksheet full of questions with all types of math equations and questions. Also, when making my word document for tests and quizzes, I know I can make the best document for my students to fill out. For example, a student will not be overwhelmed by a test or assignment when I particularly space out my questions.
Using these resources, we can make slide shows for our daily lessons. Using all the key features of either website allows for a much more engaging lesson and something useful for the students to learn from and even refer back to.
EdReady is a great way to understand where the students are in their learning and get them back on track with where they are supposed to be. Students can take a test that will analyze the areas they need more help in and then provide them with more resources to understand them
Game-based learning platform. Engages students in a quiz, a game that will let me know where students are at in the learning. It Lets students have fun but also shows you what they can do. Some good uses could be to test for knowledge of definitions and formulas and ask true and false questions.