Sunday, September 30, 2007

Addition Lesson

Visual Learning and Math

Title of Activity: Addition

URL: http://www.visualmathlearning.com/index.html

Grade Level: Grade 2

Brief Description of Activity: This website includes many great lessons and activities to keep kids busy and learning about math. The lesson I chose for grade two is addition and it contains a 15-20 minute lesson, along with the left over time to be playing addition games. By having a lesson dictated on the screen for the students to follow along with pictures and text, really adds another way to teach students math and to make it fun and interesting. The games that the students can play afterwards on the website are used as reinforcement, ways to keep the students concentrating, and less paper usage for worksheets. This is a great website to give the teacher time to circulate throughout the room and notice the students’ level of knowledge and ability to learn math concepts online and interactively.

General Learning Outcomes:

Apply a variety of addition and subtraction strategies on whole numbers to 100, and use these operations in problems.

Specific Learning Outcomes:

13. Use manipulatives, diagrams, and symbols to demonstrate and describe the process of addition and subtraction of numbers to 100.

14. Apply and explain multiple strategies to determine sums and differences on 2-digit numbers, with and without regrouping.
Most Relevant ICT Outcomes:

F1. 4.2 Solve mathematical and scientific problems by selecting appropriate technology to perform calculations and experiments.

F2. 4.1 Use technology outside formal classroom settings.

F6.1.1 Perform basic computer operations, which may vary by environment, including powering
up, inserting disks, moving the cursor, clicking on an icon, using pull-down menus, executing programs, saving files, retrieving files, printing, ejecting disks and powering down.

Brief Rationale: Mathematics has a persona of having children work independently on worksheets containing math problems. However, this website shows that students can interact with technology by following the dictated lesson and then playing interactive games. By using this website for a math class, you are allowing the students to explore the world of technology and making math fun to learn. Plus, the students can continue to learn more on their own time with this website by the lessons and games. It is great!

My Comment for Jackie

I agree with you Jackie that blogging has its time and purpose, especially when dealing with the appropriate grade level. I also feel that blogging is a great resource for the higher grades, as by this time a major of the students know web safety and the best ways to blog. I appreciated your opinion and I feel that it is for sure a valuable one. From
Jackie's blog

Sunday, September 23, 2007

I Support Blogging

I think blogging is a useful resource in that it provides students and teachers to interact with one another. I would use blogging in grade three social studies as I see it being a useful resource for when the students are studying geography. From
Clarence Fisher’s point of view, he talks about being able to read the view point of students through blogging, from countries such as Australia and Brazil. I think this is a very useful resource as kids can post their thoughts or creations (drawings) on the blog for others to comment on and learn from. The reason I would use blogging for grade three geography is that the students could look at pictures of what the world looks like by interacting with other students through blogging. Blogging also has its advantages for students and teachers, which are mentioned at this website. For students, blogging provides the opportunity for reflective journaling, assignment submission, and e-portfolios. For teachers, blogging provides networking and personal knowledge sharing, the chance to share instructional tips to students, course announcements, and links. Of course with having an online section in the classroom causes the teacher to deal with web safety. The teacher would be able to ensure the students were blogging safely if he/she requires the students to limit their comments option to only users and to only allow certain people (e-mail addresses) to look at their page and blogs. Blogging is a new source of technology that I am positive about using in my classroom and encourage other teachers to do the same.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Impression of Blogging

My impression of blogging is that it is a new source of communication for me and will take me some time to get into the groove of using it. However, I see that it can be a very useful tool in that it can be used as a journal, diary, research source, administrative tool, and/or a publication tool. In my opinion, blogging is both good and bad for the student. Its good qualities are that it provides an extra learning tool for students, allows quick and easy communication on a variety of topics, and allows teacher and student to interact outside of regular class time. The bad qualities about blogging is that it reduces the amount of ‘face to face” interaction between student and teacher and it is dangerous personally for a student, if they do not follow the correct steps in keeping themselves safe online. However, if a student is not in class with the teacher and using blogging, there is a good chance that he/she is at home and his/her parents can be aware of what their child is involved in online. I see blogging as a useful resource and look forward to expanding my knowledge even more.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Personal Introduction


Hi my name is Chelsea Pederson and I currently reside in Lethbridge, Alberta. I am a music education major at the University of Lethbridge with a minor in Physical Education. My passion's are music(piano), sports (basketball, soccer, and football), animals (my two cats Pebbles and Socks, my dog Darbie, and my 6 fish and two frogs), and my family. I love to learn and I am enjoying the education program because it is allowing me to experience the art of teaching and what I can do to be the best teacher I can be.

Learning how to blog

So I am just getting used to all this "blogging" stuff and I am trying to figure out how to post a picture! More complicated then I imagined!