Week+3+Journal+Entry

 Week 3 Goals  This week, we read about contructivism at the "C ** onstructivism as a Paradigm for Teaching and Learning site ** [] which did more that just explain what it is. It is explains what constructivism would look like in our classroom, some critical perspectives, and explains the benefits of constructivism.
 * Examine constructivist practice in your own classroom,
 * Consider various examples of needs assessments,
 * Think through the needs assessment process with your team,
 * Plan for implementation of a Student Needs Assessment, and
 * Communicate with other teams about needs assessments.

In my math classes, I believe I use some parts of the constructivism theory when I require my students to show their work. I feel that it helps them understand the steps they thought of when solving their problem. For struggling students, this really helps me understand what they learned and are able to apply on their own. It gives me a better idea of where they got lost. For the students that "just know the answer" it forces them to look at all their brain does to "come up" with the answers. This is important because they will eventually need to do math that the don't "just know" so they will need to repeat the problem solving steps that were automatic earlier in their math career. I also feel the Math Warm-Ups and Problems of the Day also allow students the ability to take ownership of their learning. They have to try them without assistance from their teachers. They need to use their resources (textbook, workbook, and binder) to help them when they are stuck. They have been very uncomfortable with this even though it is in a risk free environment. They will not be graded and we do go over them in class.

A frustration I have is the time and space limits in our classrooms. With all that we are currently required to teach, it is difficult to even allow students the opportunity to show the class the different ways the problems may have been solved. I don't have space for centers. There is barely enough room for students to work on the 5 computers in my room with the 32 student desks I need to have for my honors class. The desk space students have is very limited. Manipulatives are difficult to work with, especially if they have to record the data. Last year, we used Everyday Mathematics which uses games regularly. The cards kept sliding off their desks. Even with moving desks together to form pairs or triples, it was difficult for students to reach the cards or pieces on each other's desks. Rolling dice is another problem.

I hope to hear suggestions from other teachers on what they are doing with similar space and time issues. I know the state is working on creating a more deep curriculum instead of requiring students to become proficient in all areas of mathematics every year. We will still need to teach everything the first year we get the new standard due to taking the old version of the tests, but I am excited to see how this will all work in my room.

Our team worked on our plan for our Student Needs Assessment. After taking the Survey for this class, we were very aware of trying to keep our survey as short as possible while making sure students would clearly know what we are asking. We decided to break our survey into two parts given on different days. One survey will be made on a Word document and printed out for students on what 21st Century technology/skills do they use at home. We want this data separate so we can clearly see what students are using in their daily life. This grant is focused on teaching the way our students learn today, with technology. We want to know exactly what they have available to them at home. Our second survey will focus on what 21st Century Skills they currently use in school. We are interested in finding out not only what they use, but also, how skilled they are at using it.

I was playing around with the [|http://www.surveymonkey.com] to create a rough draft of our survey. Of course I used the old guess and check method instead of actually watching the videos or reading any directions, but did find the site easy to navigate through. I found the examples very useful when I picked the question type. It clarified what type of question would be best for the questions we plan on asking. I like the Rating Scale and Matrix of Choices, both with Only One Answer, to help group like questions together. It also helps keep the actual number of questions to a low number since we are limited to 10 questions with the free account. I am struggling with getting the survey to appear on my webpage so students can click on it and take it without having an email account. This is definitely going to be my on my to do list this week.

I'm still frustrated by the fact that we can't get to our google sites (as well as other sites) on our school computers. I hope that our district will find a way to allow the computers that are used only by the teachers (they are hooked up to the SmartBoards) to be able to work on these sites. The other site that has caused some frustration is YouTube. We can't watch the videos for our class in school since YouTube is blocked. We are learning about some fantastic sites and will learn more about how to use them with our students, yet we cannot access them during school.