Sharing is Caring- Technology Edition

Technology is something I consider myself relatively fearless with in the classroom, as I am definitely a digital native who knows there's few things a quick control-z or restart won't fix. I attended a week long institute this summer on integrating technology into math instruction and I've also been teaching in a one to one STEM magnet program for 3 years and piloting blended learning for the past 2 in Pre-Calculus. This picture has been big for me....definitely taken somewhere from the Twitter world! I find it to be a good lens when I am trying to integrate tech for the sake a tech- a way to check myself before I wreck myself, if you will. 

I love the quote from Goos, Galbraith, Renshaw and Geiger (2003) about using technology as a partner in education, saying that it should be “used creatively to increase the power students exercise over their learning; for example, by providing access to new kinds of tasks or new ways of approaching existing tasks." We have so much power to do that these days and it's something I'm still trying hard to learn myself. It should be transforming the tasks and challenges we give our students. 

So tomorrow is our annual PD day in my district and there are few things I love more than sitting in a room of math teachers, nerding out about our content. It is also the first time I've been asked to plan and implement my own PD for other secondary math teachers about integrating technology into secondary math and designing it has been one of my favorite tasks all year.  Trying to narrow down exactly what to share has been challenging, but here's what I've come up with: 

• Desmos Polygraph Activity (because if you haven't seen it before, be ready to fall in love)
• Discussion about cognitive demand of tasks and metaphors for technology-mediated learning
• An activity (admittedly adapted from an amazing activity we did at the institute) where students use dynamic software to find the characteristics of quadrilaterals and create a hierarchical classification system of them
• Some quick "tips and tricks" I've learned from teaching blended and STEM
• An hour of self-guided "challenges" that I've written to allow people to move at their own pace through using Desmos, Geogebra, and Google Docs in different ways

Here are all of my files for the PD if anyone is interested in checking them out!

Presentation Materials

Now, if I can somehow find the time to simultaneously be in 3 places at once, tomorrow will be a big success!