GAME plan progress

So far so good with my GAME plan. As I mentioned in my previous blog, I have already attended Moodle training so I have access to Moodle and can create my own online classroom using this online course management software. Soon after my training we had a math teacher meeting at our school. In my district many of the math departments are in a program called Mission Possible and as part of that program each school hosts a math meeting on various topics. Our school was presenting on exponential functions and I suggested that we look at some online activities to share at our meeting since nobody had done that before. My fellow teachers liked the idea and I was in charge of preparing the online part of our meeting. I decided that I was going to take all of the different material that I found and create a webquest using Moodle for our meeting. During the meeting we only looked at two parts of the webquest, an applet and a flash game of the Towers of Hanoi which was used for an activity, but I created the whole webquest as if I was preparing to use it in class. Now when my class gets to this unit on exponential functions I will already have a webquest ready for them.

My second goal was to facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity. During the short week before thanksgiving I always do a lab about hovercrafts. Students have always enjoyed this lab and it really solidifies my students understanding of proportions and direct variations. This fun activity is one of my most successful at inspiring student learning. I am trying to work on student creativity by having students make word problems of their own for each topic that we cover. Often times creating problems in Algebra is challenging because you can’t pick any numbers you want if you plan to have an answer that makes sense. For each lesson I am spending a little time showing students how I come up with problems for that lesson and then guiding them through the creation of some of their own problems. It is hard for my students to figure out how to make problems and be creative in math class but they can be creative and if they understand how to make a problem, solving other problems becomes much easier.

The one thing I have not done is combine my two goals together and inspire creativity in response to some of the digital learning experiences I am creating. This is my next step in the implementation of my GAME plan.