Design your own Teacher’s Lounge…

     Have you ever steered clear of the Teacher’s Lounge because the conversations did not interest you?  What if you could design your perfect Teacher’s lounge?  Who would you invite to come in during your break?   This is called your Personal Learning Network (PLN).  

     You could use online social media to build your PLN Teacher’s Lounge.  You could “friend” teachers like you in Facebook, “follow” teachers like you on Twitter, share favorite links on Delicious, and much more.  Think about how you can better prepare your students to be productive citizens in the 21^st century.  Think about the last time you shared a new technology tool with your fellow teachers.  

Now go and design your own Teacher’s Lounge…

What are you afraid of?

What are you afraid of?

     I have gone without internet several times each week at school and even at home.  Even my scientific calculator needed troubleshooting for calculating trigonometric functions by changing the mode to degrees.  Technology can not do everything for me.  For instance our graphing calculators can not multiply and divide polynomials.  I offered my student a choice to download an application or to write a program in order to multiply and divide the polynomials.  He chose to input a program (which we found on the internet).  Of course we ran into a problem...I was able to solve it an hour later.  Things would go much smoother if we did not have all this fancy technology...but I would not choose to go without Skyping my family, a cell phone, a washing machine & dryer, refrigerator, microwave, you name it.

     Next school year we will have a computer lab--I hope it comes with IT support.  We do have a friend who is gearing up to come back to Xi'an as a Media teacher. Yay!

What are you afraid of?

Turn a dream into reality...

Turn a dream into reality...

• What apps do you already do in your classroom? 

With our new textbooks come videos, PowerPoint, digital solutions, and extra practice problems.  Students use Graphing Calculators, not just for graphing, but also for statistics.  

• What do you want to do to be better?

It would be great for students to each have a computer with their eText, graphing calculator, and geometry sketchpad.  But to top it off math video games would be our means of assessment.  

• How can you do it?

We will not need to order text books during the next math curriculum cycle again.  I will be familiar and comfortable with student computers, and eTexts.

Turn a dream into reality...