Inspiration: Regular and Irregular Polygons

This graphic organizer would be great in a high school geometry class. There are notes attached to each type of polygon describing their properties. The graphic organizer includes images, which allows students to connect what they are learning about geometry to the real world!

Scavenger Hunt

Beautiful Butterflies!!!

Picnik

I love using Picnik! Even though I was familiar with this online tool prior to the presentation in class, I never used it until I took this course. I stumbled upon it while trying to edit photos that I uploaded to my google account, the same way I began using picasa. Since then, I have spent far too much time exploring all of the different things you can do to photos. I used picnik to edit all of the screen shots used in the prezi that Whitaker and I created as an artifact for our Web 2.0 project. Using picnik makes me happy; I just love to read the little things it says while the site loads, like "sprinkling dew" and "stealing picnik baskets." It also makes me happy that I do not have to create an account to use it. All the user names and passwords I have created for this class are really annoying! It wasn't so bad at first, but now the list is getting a little too long. Oh well.

Glogging???

Ok, so the glogster website says stop blogging and start glogging. I really don't see how the two are similar. Glogster seems like a great tool to display information, but it is probably not the best online tool to exchange information, as blogs do. 

Glogs are great for creatively displaying classroom rules, but I think it would be really great if they could be printed out as a poster that could be displayed in the classroom. I think it is most useful for students to use to create about me pages, book reports, or other projects that have traditionally been done using poster boards. Its a very green approach to creating posters. On the other hand, I don't like how they try to upsell their products. For example, while I was creating a glog and I tried to use a certain tool from the magnet tool and most of the tools listed are not available with the free account. This is disturbing. If students are using this, they do not need to be distracted by all the things they could do if they were to upgrade to a premium account.

Lesson Planning

It is obviously very important for teachers to plan their lessons and be prepared for class each day. I just find it more difficult to plan for high school math classes. Most people have had pretty much the same experiences with high school math classes. You usually go to class and take notes. It is more difficult for us math people to do really engaging things in our classrooms because we have not seen this first hand. I hope that the internship year will expose me to some really great teachings styles and activities that stray from the norm. I am also looking forward to learning more about the online resources available for high school math teachers. Working on the lesson plan, it was difficult for me to think of accommodations that could be made. I look forward to talking to teachers about the things that they do in their classes to accommodate the needs of students with disabilities. As this is my first semester taking any education classes, and I am taking four this semester, it is difficult for me to have answers to "what would you do in your classroom" questions. It is a little scary because I will be teaching very soon, and I have spent so much of my college career in classes that had nothing to do with education. I still have a strong passion for teaching and I look forward to learning ways to improve my lesson plans so that I can become the awesome, prepared teacher that I have always wanted to be.