Re-energized and Refocused

About a week ago, I had the amazing opportunity to not only attend, but also help present at the Math-in-Action (MIA) conference at GVSU. This math education conference brought together math educators of all levels from across the Midwest to help teachers discover new ways to improve their classroom. By the end of the day, my decision to become a teacher was reaffirmed, my passion for teaching was seemingly at an all-time high, and my itch to get in the classroom already was scratched to the point that I couldn't focus on my homework later that day.

Wake up, Nick! I had to snap myself back into Nick the pre-service teacher who still has a lot to learn. I had to remind myself that I have yet to write a lesson plan, create my own activity other than worksheets and a KaHoot review game built from textbook problems, and initially teach students material, among other things. In just over two short years, I will be looking for a teaching position. By that time, I would like to be ready to make an impact on my future students having acquired the necessary skills and feeling the same excitement and passion that I was feeling after MIA. But what I do know is that I have many fantastic takeaways to, well, take away from MIA. The biggest of which is the necessity to incorporate technology and mathematical literacy in the classroom. I had always realized the necessity for both, but now I have tangible ways to make these a reality. One way to infuse both came from the first session I attended. Zach Cresswell, a high school math teacher in Michigan, discussed the concept of an inquiry based flipped classroom, which I am very interested in bringing to the classroom, and his experiences with it. As a part of his model, he has students blogging about various aspects of class.

Really? How had this not hit me until he explicitly stated it?! What am I doing right now? Blogging. As Zach explained, students +  blogging = getting a better idea of a student's understanding. Here are a few examples of his students blogs that demonstrate what I believe to be the power of having students blog about class. These examples show that student blogging not only gets the student thinking critically about a given concept, but it also allows the teacher to obtain a more accurate reading of the student's understanding. This benefit is something I view as a must in my classroom. Much like the SBAR assessments in my math education class, I would much rather place an emphasis on conceptual understanding than being able to perform an algorithmic computation.

Let's be real; this is NOT math

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being able to find the correct answer. But what is it worth if you cannot explain the concept behind it? I think that a student blogging about the connections between the unit circle and the trig function from an activity that uses a program like the one below (slowed down of course) is much more worthwhile for the student (and the teacher!) than answering a few computational trig function problems for homework since it gets at something deeper than meaningless values.

This is so cool, right?

Anyways, I really like how versatile student blogging is with what a teacher can do with it. It can be used for an explanation of a homework problem, a mini project, a check for in-class understanding, and any other form of concept check,to name a few, while allowing a student to further develop mathematical literacy. When Zach (@z_cress) reads a "good" blog post and shares it via twitter, the students are shocked at how the MTBoS responds to their blogs. The students are really excited that real math people are viewing their post, not just their classmates. I love how this initiates a sense of professionalism with students. It helps to teach them that their work matters and is of worth. With all of these benefits, I cannot imagine a classroom of mine where student blogging is absent. After all, what math teacher doesn't want his or her students excited to talk about math?