Blog 1-What is infinity

In class we were asked the question what is infinity. My definition for infinity is an endless amount of possibilities. So I leave you with this blank blog as a symbol on the endless possibilities of mathematical history I could write about...


























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Just kidding. As a future math teacher, I need to think about how to answer difficult questions much like this one. I’m sure every teacher has a list of questions that they hope students will never ask. This is one that is on mine. What is infinity is a hard question to answer because there are multiple ways of answering it. Like I said above, my definition of infinity is endless amounts of possibilities. The best way I think I can describe infinity is to compare it to the future. The future is never ending in fact there is always a future. If you are talking about a specific day in the future, as soon as you get to that day, it is no longer future it is the present. But there is still a future.  Infinity is always there and is never ending.

So what do we do as teachers when asked these kinds of questions? Well first I think we need to take a deep breath and get ready to think on our feet. We can't take away time from class to address these kinds of questions. We can however start the conversation and leave to student with something else to think about. Maybe tell them a quick thought and ask them what they think the answer to their question is. Maybe have it as an extra project that students could do outside of class if they really want the answer. Have them research the question and come up with their own answer. In most cases my guess is that the student is just trying to waste time in class so students are not actually going to go research the answer.

Some of these questions could be used to our advantage to get students to form their own opinions. We don't always have to give them our thoughts on questions. We can allow them time to form their own conclusions and thought on a topic.

These are just some ideas of mine and are in no way the correct answer. I am still learning how to be a teacher and I am open to any suggestions other people have. So, I leave you with this question. What would you say if a student asked you what is infinity?

Blog #5 EDT 370-02

Using a blog is a great way to reflect on how your lesson went. It also allows other teachers a chance to read your experiences and use them in their own classroom. Having a blog can give other teachers a chance to also offer advise to each other to help improve lessons that may not have gone as planned. There is always room for improvement so sharing your own experiences with others can help you and other teachers grow as educators.

As a teacher, I'm not sure if I will make my students use a blog. I may use a blog to talk about my own personal experiences in the classroom. However, blogs are not private and I think students would prefer something a bit more private in regards to talking about their school experience. My personal reflections from class I think are great especially as a new teacher. I have used my blog before to reflect on my experience as a substitute teacher. I got a lot of supportive comments from other people and great suggestions on how to improve myself in the future.

Blog #4 EDT 370-02

http://profjonh.blogspot.com/
Jon Hasenbank is a professor at Grand Valley State University. His blogs are math education related and are often about topics we have discussed in our class.

http://mathhombre.blogspot.com/
John Golden is a math education professor at Grand Valley State University. His blogs talk about different math activities and will often quote some of his students responses. He also provides other resources for his readers to use.


http://mrbilkos.weebly.com/
Connor is a math education student and in a few of my classes. Although he is not a teacher yet, I think reading other students blogs are just as useful as reading current teachers blogs. Our blogs can help us to share our own experiences in the classroom.


https://teacherwiththepersonalityofamiddleschooler.wordpress.com/
Kim is also a math education student. Her blogs often talk about her experiences with teacher assisting. Her blogs also involve a middle school perspective which is different from my high school experience.

https://johnmadeblog.wordpress.com/
Madelyn is a math education student. Her blogs are more for classes but talk about her experiences in the classroom. She is teacher assisting at a middle school.


I chose to put two teacher and three student blogs because I think it is important to not only read teachers perspectives, but also other students perspectives that are in the same point in their education as I am. We can learn from each others experiences in the classroom as we move forward in our education and professional experiences.

Blog #3 EDT 370-02

10 people/organizations I chose to follow as below:

@mathhombre    This is a professor at GVSU. I have him as a professor now. He is always retweeting interesting math posts and is a great resource.

@ExploreMTBoS   This is a global math department on Twitter. It is free and provides amazing resources to teachers.

@Desmos  This is another great resource to teachers on Twitter and Facebook. Desmos has online math activities for teachers to use in their classroom. I have tried a few of them and the activities are fun.

@geogebra     Geogebra is another great website. You can follow them on Twitter or Facebook. Geogebra is a free math app that can be used for multiple things.

@dccmath     This is a former professor of mine. He is a math professor at GVSU and a great advisor



@ProfJonh  This is another of my math professors. He constantly shares math blogs that are useful.



@GetKahoot     Kahoot is an amazing website that allows teachers to create games to test students knowledge. 

@GVSUmath ‏ This is the Twitter for Grand Valley math department. This is a great way to connect with math teachers and get useful website the math department uses.

@MathJokes       This has a lot of math jokes and tricks on it. Sometimes you need to make students laugh in order to get their attention and sometimes you just need something to laugh at yourself

@AlgebraFact       This have higher level math facts for algebra.

Blog #2 EDT 370-02

Blog #2 is finding a national and state-level educational organization. The first organization is called Math Twitter Blogosphere (MTBoS). This is a global math department that gives math teachers a place to share useful activities, information, and resources to other teachers. You can follow them on Twitter for free @ExploreMTBoS and can read through numerous amounts of blogs. It is a great resource to use.


The state-level organization is the Michigan Education Association.  This is an organization you can join. Becoming a member provides professional support and training opportunities at MEA conferences, professional labor relations consultants, legal assistance, and much more. There are multiple conferences that you can attend and the link above is to their website

Workshop 4 EDI 331

Growing as a teacher is my main goal for this semester. Part of that is getting better at creating lesson plans for a single day and for multiple days. When I create lesson plans first I know I need to make sure I cover the material that I need to teach. Second is finding a creative way of doing it. I do not want to be that teacher who lectures everyday while students take notes. There will have to be days where that is the only thing we do but it does not have to be a daily thing. I want to work on creating activities that students will enjoy and that push them to problem solve. I want them to think about the problem and work together to figure it out.

Let me give you an example of what I mean from my teacher assisting observations. My CT creative an activity for students to work together at their tables (groups of 3 or 4). The problem had a map with street names on it. The problem stated that there were two boys who had two-way radios that only worked within a 4-block radius. The problem stated where each boy lived and asked if they would be able to communicate with each other from their houses. Students were given a big piece of paper to draw their solution on to share with the class. Walking around most groups first thought that the answer was no because if you walked straight left, right, up, or down, then the number of blocks between each house was 5 blocks. However, as students started to discuss the problem more, students started to realize that radio waves don’t travel by street block and instead can go straight through (over) houses.

This activity was to get students thinking about the distance formula. If you drew out the picture and connect the houses and streets, it made a right triangle. We knew the lengths of the sides of the triangle but not the hypotenuse length. Some students actually knew how to find it and use formulas to find a numerical answer. These are the types of activities that I want to create because it got students to problem solve and look deeper into the problem.

EDI 331- workshops 2 and 3

Workshop 2: Math Workshop style lessons can be characterized in many ways. In my opinion, a Math Workshop will include some sort activity to get students to think through problems rather than having the teacher tell students what to do. The book Minds on Mathematics talks about how we need to give students the opportunity to think and develop their own thinking first. Quite often people think of math classes as teacher lectures and then students repeat the process in their homework. Using a Math Workshop, teachers should allow their students to think about the math themselves and construct their own way of thinking about the problems. There is more than one way of doing math problems and sometimes students know more about math then we give them credit for.

Workshop 3: When I hear the phrase, "Improve teaching, not teachers," I have to stop and think about what I am learning now as a education student. Growing up and even now, when students don't do well on something the teacher is the first to be blamed. More often, it should be the student who should be blamed rather than the teacher for not putting the time or effort into the task. There are times however, that it is not the student or teacher who is to blame for someone not understanding a topic. As someone going into education, I am amazed by the number of requirements and standards that teachers are expected to teach students in a short period of time. On top of this short time frame, each teacher must teach to multiple students who all learn in different ways. I have had many amazing teachers who try their best to teach the same lesson in multiple ways during class to help teach as many students as possible. But lets be honest here... There is no way of teaching every person in the way they learn best during every class. There was a line from the book The Teaching Gap that really stood out to me. "Our students are being shortchanged. They could be learning much more and much more deeply than they are learning now " (Page 5). In my education classes we continue to learn how it is better to get students to think for themselves before going over how to do the problems. Allowing students to develop their own level of understanding is better then just giving them the information and asking them to repeat the process in their homework. This would be great if teachers were not given so many standards and requirements that they need to teach. I believe most teacher will try to give students time to develop their thinking but in some cases there just isn't the time for this to happen. In the end, I do agree with the phrase, "Improve teaching, not teachers" because the teachers are doing what they are told to teach and not necessarily teaching how they want to teach.

About me

Hello everyone, my name is Olivia Brown. I am a secondary math education major with a chemistry minor. I am currently in my final year at Grand Valley and I am teacher assisting at Godwin Heights High School. My goal is to teach high school math after I graduate. I have grown up in the Grand Rapids area and have had some amazing teachers who have inspired me to become a teacher. I love helping students and seeing the "light bulb" go off. I have volunteered in a high school math classroom for five years and became a substitute teacher last year. I am looking forward to this final year at Grand Valley. 

I have taken classes about how to use technology in a math class but have not had many opportunities to actually try them in class. I would like to try using more technology but I also like having more hands on activities so students are not using a computer everyday. 

Something that is important to me or something I like to do other than teaching is that I love decorating cakes. There is a picture below of some Valentines Day cupcakes I made this last year. Decorating cakes is something I like to do when I need to relax and just have some fun.

As a side note, I started this blog last year for one of my classes and use this blog for multiple classes this semester.