This week I chose to follow quite a few hashtags related to
teaching and education. I started following #alg1chat, #geomchat, #mathchat,
#edchat, #engagechat, #math, #teacherprep, and #putkidsfirst. I chose the math
ones because I am a high school math teacher and more specifically, I teach
both Algebra 1 and Geometry. I also wanted to follow other educational hashtags
that could help give me overall ideas within my classroom and lessons.
Once I started looking into the posts within each hashtag, I
immediately started finding a lot of great ideas and resources. Under the #geomchat,
I found a great tool that I could incorporate into my dilations lesson to help
students understand and also investigate the concept on their own. It was set
up on Gizmo and also had a student exploration sheet, answer key, teacher
guide, and vocabulary sheet attached. Another great tool I found was under
#mathchat. It was a link to an app my students could download through iTunes to
help them with their multiplication skills. This may seem too basic when
thinking about the fact that I teach high school, but one class that I teach is
the slower paced Algebra 1 class for a group of students who still struggle
with the foundations such as simple multiplication. So this app could be a
great tool to help build their confidence within math in general! I found many
more great resources and articles, but the last one I’m going to share with you
is one on project based learning that I found under #math. It was a project
that used Domino’s pizza to help students understand slope-intercept form. I
feel that it is extremely important for math students to truly understand
slope, how to write a linear equation, and truly understand what the equation
represents. This project really gets into the students fully grasping the
concept which is awesome to see.
As far as using Twitter as a “just in time professional
development,” I think it is a great idea. I just finished my third year of
teaching and with that; I now really want to try more on hands learning with my
students. My course load is finally consistent and I’m feeling confident enough
to really take my lessons to another level. I really believe that Twitter can
and will be a great resource for me with this. It is so true that technology
keeps changing so quickly and with that, the access to Twitter can help us as
teachers to keep up with those changes close to the same pace (versus the usual
professional development within our school districts that is taught the exact
same way for years). I’m really excited to continue to grow as a learner and
teacher through the usage of Twitter.
Links to the resources I found if interested:
1. Found from #geomchat
2. Found from #mathchat
3. Found from #math
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