Week+7+Journal+Entry

Our team worked on our surveys this past week. We used Survey Monkey's free account, but did not realize that it did not gather the results for us in a spreadsheet unless we had a paid membership. Our group was to meet on Friday, but, unfortunately, I've been out with a migraine. I'm better and trying to get caught up but will need to finish the results tomorrow after talking to my team.

An Introduction to Project Learning After watching this video, I decided to spend some time looking for projects I could use in my math class. I put some sites that interested me on my google siteand will investigate them further.

In my integrated math classes, I have a co-teacher that is very interested in comic books and was involved in a comic book initiative. I've suggested we come up with a project using comic books. I thought about having students create their own comic based on a math concept. I also thought it would be interesting to have students look at how comics have used math by looking at comics. I'll have to check to see if Math Humor works at school. I just checked it out at home and it suggest going to Universal Reprints since Math Humor does not have permission to post the comics on their site. At that site, it also has information on using the comics as an educator.

Anyway, this is definitely something to develop over break.

The clips from the ORC website were all on Electricity. I like the way the teacher worked with the students. He gave them the needed supplies, circulated to make sure specific skills were demonstrated and asked questions about what they did. He also asked process questions about what they created as well as how the teaming worked for them. The teacher also related their thinking processes to what happens in the real world and had students restate what the goal of their project was. It gives me some insight into my role when students are working on whatever I decide to do with a math project.

I have used cooperative groups in the past in my math classes as well as Social Studies and Language Arts. I do plan on using it for this comic project. I have used assigned groups more than random or student chosen groups, although I have used them, too. I want to make sure each group has someone with math skills since many in these classes struggle with them.