Thing 13

I had the good fortune on the early release day in early October to have Karen come in to present to Highland staff the research calculator. We went to http://www.metrolibraries.net/pro/dribbling.html. There are so many steps for this research that could help students get organized. As a group of teachers we have discussed the usefulness of this calculator. Some of the parts of it were also demonstrated by Leslie Yoder in one of our session. I guess my personal feeling is that I would utilize some parts of the calculator if I was having my students do a longer research paper. In math class if I assign research it is usually happening simultaneously with the other parts of the class. This can be overwhelming to students. I have found that they can not organize their time and thoughts. The research calculator can help students work with a deadline by helping them to create their own deadlines with dates of thesis statement, beginning the research, brainstorming and focusing their ideas to less broad topics. This site had some information literacy lessons that could be done in the class to emphisize the steps used in any research.

Thing 10

I did a little search or googling for some math items. The one site that I looked at was Dr. Math and I found some good reference information for my students with history of percent. I also found some good questions and answers to why we do constructions in geometry. These will be excellent reference material in my classes. I also went ot utube and found the very funny video of Ma andPa Kettle doing math. One must understand the concept to appreciate the humor. My students will love it. I plan to get the students attention by using at least one of these on test review day in my algebra class before finals.

Thing 14

What a great class we had today. We worked in groups in a jigsaw manner. We each looked at one online resource found in the www.connect.spps.org. My group looked at united streaming and where we could look at a tutorial to learn more on its use. We discovered that in the Atomic Learning their is a tutorial that explains all the A,B, C's for streaming. It looks like the home page has a title of Discovering streaming. This is an easy access for many different subjects. In mathematics I saw a nice video on functions that I could use in my class. It was stated that there are a number of other databases that link to united streaming. Students will enjoy the videos. There are teacher planning tools as well as quizes at the end of a video. There were some great suggestions to prepare for presenting the video in class. One was to download to the desktop for easy access. Another was to burn it on to a DVD. To enlarge the screen it was suggested to use the remote control and zoom for a clearer picture. It was also suggested that we use speakers since the computer speaker is not able to give the volume for the class.
Along with this database we were exposed to a number of other reliable resources. Gale had the student Edition, Informe, and Discovery, EBSCO, SIRS Discover for grades 4-9 and Researcher for grades 9-12. So many resources. It was a very good class for we students to dig in. Thank you Metronet and friends.

Thing 15

On November 8 I was able to help my advisory students connect to the online resouces available to them at connect.spps.org in our Mac Lab at Highland. Thanks to our media specialist who initiated this 9th grade introduction to all of our students. She designed a nice 8-10 questionairre that had all students look for some key locations. I am sure these students will be able to use this in the future to find reliable resources for all their classes.