Reflection on the David Theune Presentation

The David Theune presentation was fantastic. David is passionate about the profession of teaching and extremely creative when it comes to assignments. His creativity and passion for teaching were inspiring to me and I really appreciate all of the things he does. He recognized that not all schools are as fortunate as to have access to chrome books and such and made suggestions about what teachers could do to compensate. I love the idea of consulting with other teachers in the building on presenting assignments to each others classes. In addition, I think it is awesome that David invites parents to come to observe class whenever they want. I don't think any of my teachers ever did that and maintaining that parent-teacher relationship is vitally important in the student learning process.

In addition, I believe it is vitally important that teachers become active parts of their community. David took that idea and ran with it, partnering up with local non-profits and giving his students the opportunity to have a positive impact on their community. As a history teacher, this is something that I want to somehow incorporate in my own teaching. I think that teaching history gives me a unique opportunity to help students connect with their community in positive ways and I am open to learning about any method of doing so.

David's connection with technology is great as well. He is an active member of the social media community, maintains a blog, and streams his classes among other things. I think this is a great way to connect with parents and the community and maintain relationships with students while informing them of academic work. I hope to utilize technology in my classroom as effectively as David does in his. It can be a vital tool in student learning if used correctly.

Reactions to Connections Across Disciplines

For this assignment I read through Holly, Stephen, and Matt's lesson plan about linear functions. The purpose of their lesson was to get students to understand how to graph linear functions. The unique part about their lesson plan is that it incorporated a tablet/web application called Geogebra. I had never heard of this app before reading through their lesson so I decided to do a little research of my own (this could also be procrastination). Geogebra is easy to use and helps students understand different geometric and algebraic functions. I think using this app could be helpful because it provides kids with a different kind of visual representation of the function and also allows them to be hands on in the sense that students are in charge of operating the app.

In terms of their pedagogical approach, I appreciate the fact that they wanted the students to prove their work before they graph their line or find the equation on the app. It is too easy for students to just plug in numbers on an app and that is definitely something that I fear when bringing technology into the classroom. Forcing the students to show their work and explain what they did is very important, especially in this lesson.

Since all three members of this group will teach different content areas, I appreciated how they talked about how the lesson structure would transfer to different content areas including history and english. Although I don't know of any apps that would necessarily work in my content area, I would be willing to experiment with them if they did exist. I want to hear what other people think about the idea of incorporating apps in the classroom in their content areas. Does anyone think this could work outside of math?