Bringing the Web to Me

For my project this week I chose to seek out content related to a particular subject area in my teaching. Math is one of my minors and I've mentioned in this blog before about wanting to use technology to help seek out ideas for math instruction, particularly ideas I can use to make math more engaging for students. I've had experience in some of my other teaching classes in searching out resources that would be useful for instruction in reading and writing, but not for math as of yet. This assignment seemed like a good opportunity to poke around on the web and find blogs, news, and other sites related to math education.

I found a couple blogs on math education that I think will be useful, Math Education Research Blog, written by a math ed professor in Sweden, and Homeschool Math Blog, written by a homeschool mom who enjoys teaching math and wants to share her ideas. Both of these blogs post news and research articles about math ed, links to sites with teaching resources, book reviews, and other thoughts about ideas in math education. The Math Education Research Blog also shares lots of good information about math education internationally, which I think will be beneficial for me as a teacher to find fresh ideas from countries other than the U.S. Another site I found, Math Shortcut, features printable math worksheets, lesson plan ideas, and links to online math games for students. Click here to see my public page on these resources from Google reader.

RSS definitely has potential to help me keep my thumb on the most up to date information, resources, and ideas in education. Not every good resource site has RSS feeds, as I found while searching for math ed websites, but many blogs and some sites do frequently post links to sites with useful tools and fresh lesson ideas. I definitely see benefits in checking out sites that others in my field recommend. I can use RSS to stay up to date on education news and research articles to further my professional development and knowledge of what is happening in the education field. To share information with parents, once I've created a strong collection of teaching resource feeds I'll be able to easily share information with parents concerned about some aspect of their child's education, or who just want to know more. For example, using my collection of feeds on math education, I can provide resources and ideas to parents of students either struggling in math or needing math enrichment activities to challenge them. For more technologically aware parents, I can encourage them to subscribe to RSS feeds of websites I've found, class blogs, or even my own blogs as well. I can see RSS as a great communication tool.

On another note, I set up an iGoogle this week, which I'm using to keep Google reader, Gmail, and Blogger all in one place. I also set up a calendar and even a moon phases widget, which is useful for some of the things I'm doing in SME 301 right now. I also subscribed to a couple color guard websites to stay up to date on that information. I'm hoping to add a few more of my own personal feeds to my reader soon.

Notable Education Blogs

This blog, the Class of Ambrose,was created by a 5th grade teacher at a school in Detroit. I took the time to look through this blog mostly because it came from a Michigan school in a grade I am interested in teaching. This teacher has clearly made good use of this blog to provide his students with information and resources to benefit their learning. Some of the early posts provide information for both students and parents with clear instructions on how to use blogs, along with links to other important technology. For example the teacher posted a link and instructions for families to download Firefox for their computers. Other things I liked about this blog were the posts announcing upcoming test dates and project due dates with study information included, descriptions of the GLCEs for 5th grade and the applicable GLCE for each topic they studied, and YouTube videos of lessons he had done in class for students to re-watch should they need a refresher on the material covered. I like how he lets his students know so much about the GLCEs and lets them see exactly which GLCEs they are covering in class and when. The YouTube videos seem to be a particularly useful tool for math, giving students the opportunity to see a math lesson a second time. He also provides his students with other math help resources.

The next blog, Simply Teaching, is written by a New Hampshire 4th grade teacher, posting his experiences in teaching and providing advice and ideas to other teachers. He focuses a lot of his posts around ideas for teaching that meant to be simple, but useful and effective. He provides price and product information from Amazon.com for many of the resources he uses, his goal being to show items that teachers can get for their classrooms that are less expensive. Other posts provide reviews of books he has used in his classroom, both resource books for teachers and fiction and non-fiction books for students. I really liked this aspect of his blog, since I'm always interested in other opinions about good books for children at the grade level I hope to teach. I find that blogs are great places to get the word out about good books, both in education and in general. This is definitely a good blog to check out for ideas on many aspects of teaching.