TetzMathPortfolio
“Games have grown up, and playing them is no longer reserved for children. In fact, the ability to play may be the single most important skill to develop for the 21st century.” (Thomas & Brown, 2011)
Complexity
In our cohort, every person chose a different book on complexity to read summarize and present. I chose Kevin Kelly’s book because it deals with artificial intelligence and technology. It was a great but very long book. Due to its length, this is not a summary of the whole book but only the first portion of it, the part that focused on complexity.
Through reading this book, my understanding of complexity increased tremendously and I was able to see complexity in more parts of my world than I had before. It was interesting to see how all our ideas of complexity grew a little bit differently due to the difference in reading material we chose. However, having slightly different views helped us to see more ways that complexity exists and all of our understandings grew as a result.
MEd Showcase
Complexity in Mathematics Learning
I created this graphic to try and describe how each student has their own unique learning profile that is more than just identifying students with learning difficulties or English Language Learners. Imagine each one of these bubbles is a bubble in a lava lamp. The bubbles move around and group up to form a unique learning profile. What a student brings into the class is very different student to student and as a result, every class has different learning needs.
As a teacher, the more information about a student that you know the easier it is to try to find a prior knowledge link to use to attach new knowledge to. However, one must also realize that some students, due to the lave lamp bubbles that have coalesced to create them, may have no prior knowledge to link to and needs something to link to before learning can move forward. Since creating the graphic, I have found a few more bubbles that need to get added as every year new challenges affect a student’s ability to learn.
Task Design
This task focused on mathematical misconceptions. I chose to look at exponents, as it is part of the grade 8 program of studies here in Alberta. Many students have difficulty with the difference between three raised to the power of 2 and three multiplied by 2 and I wanted to create a task that helped them to identify the difference in a number of ways.
As well, this was the perfect opportunity to introduce the necessary vocabulary for those students who had no exposure to the concept of exponents and those who are just learning English. The game is in draft form only as the important part of the project was to identify the strategic choices we made in the creation of this activity. However, I am sure the next time I teach grade 8 math I will be making this game to play with my class.
This assignment was very novel as the audience was the mathematical community itself not my professors. The task was to create a webpage on a mathematical concept or idea that did not exist in the mathematical database called Mathemapedia, part of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM). After I had written my page and gotten feedback for Anne Watson and John mason, I had to submit my page to the NCETM for approval. You can only access the page after creating an account with the NCETM so I have included a pdf of the screen prints from my article.
People in the Field
I chose Gloria Ladson-Billings as a person in the field to highlight because of her belief that the labels that we place on students matter. Many students will inform you that they can’t do math because they are on an Individual Program Plan (IPP). They chose to opt out of learning because it may be difficult, instead of their IPP helping to support them to be successful doing grade level work. Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work not only applies to the African- American population that she studies but to all students who feel marginalized by traditional schooling.
I chose Stephen Campbell as the person in the field to highlight due to his interest in embodiment in the virtual world. His work is exploring if it is possible to create mathematical tasks in the mathematical world of virtual reality that would create the prior knowledge students need to build on to be successful in mathematics. As well, the work being done around mathematical anxiety is also really interesting to me because so many of my students arrive in junior high believing that they are “not math people”.
Exponent Sorting
Gloria Ladson-Billings
Stephen Campbell
Textbook Re-Design
This was a very eye-opening task which required us to take a question out of the textbook and then figure out how to make it into a rich task. Rich tasks are ones that deepen student understanding of the why’s behind the mathematical algorithms. It was especially helpful that the readings we had completed as well as our in-class sessions gave us the tools to look at the problem and not see it as bad but see it only as a starting point from which to expand. I found this task has helped me greatly when designing questions to use with my classes. I now try to find how to elicit the understanding I want, rather than just telling.