I love the idea of using technology when teaching math, and I think students do as well. During this past school year, I had the opportunity to work with elementary students each day in the tech lab as a paraprofessional. In this role, I was able to see how positively students responded to utilizing technology in a variety of ways. We worked on a variety of projects, with many of them being math-related. Many times, however, the students did not even think about the fact that they were doing math, they just focused on the fun!
One project involved researching the costs related to owing a puppy, which engaged the kids immediately. They enjoyed browsing the PetSmart website in search of the perfect dog collar, dog bed, and grooming tools. The students needed to keep their “purchases” within a certain budget allowance. Once they located all of the items they needed, they placed their data into Microsoft Excel and learned how the program can quickly calculate totals for them. If they were over their budget, they needed to determine how to adjust their purchases to stay within the budget. Another project required the students to tally up various colors of jellybeans (and eat them, of course), and enter the data into an Excel spreadsheet and create a pie chart that clearly showed the percentages of each color of jellybean.
Often times the students would finish their projects before the entire hour of tech lab was over. In these situations, I was able to direct them to various websites where they could play math games. A favorite was “Math Mayhem” (http://members.learningplanet.com/act/mayhem/free.asp), where students competed against each other in addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. Another popular one was “Bloxorz” (http://www.coolmath-games.com/0-bloxorz/index.html), which gave the students practice in strategic problem solving and exploration with geometric shapes.
As a teacher, I hope to utilize technology in my math lessons as much as possible. My experiences as a paraprofessional have shown me that students respond very well to this. There is an extremely large amount of free online math activities and games that can enhance the math curriculum at any grade level. Utilizing these resources can help students see that math can be very fun!
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2 comments:
I agree with your view on technology. I can envision your story in the computer lab. If it is fun for kids they will never associate math with such a poor connotation.
Math needs to stop being perceived as a four letter word. There needs to be an overhaul of it is delivered to students.
The ideas your listed were fun options for elementary math! Building core skills while engaging students at a high level is a sign of great teaching. Teaching sometimes reminds me of fishing, if you can get a student to take the bait, most often you have them hooked. Some of these 'outside the box' activities in math seem to be the bait that gets students excited and interested.
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