Last night

Last night of class, I thought it went very well. I was excited to see the rest of the tip papers. We did several things tonight. We finished up our talks on the TWS, the tip papers and we received our letters that we wrote on the 2nd week of class. It is always cool to see what I wrote weeks ago and come back to it several weeks later and see what I thought and how my thoughts changed. I have been doing this for a few years by leaving a letter to myself at my grandparents in St. Louis so I only see this once every 2-3 years.
    I thought that the remaining tip projects were very neat and engaging. I like the "leo" test, can't remember what it's called off the top of my head. I like the idea of being able to track students strength and weaknesses. I see many different ways of doing this with my future math classes. I could work on different levels of blooms, different concepts and so many other ways. I thought the other's were equally great, I just can't remember them off the top of my head.

Tip Paper

This week we worked on the tips papers in class, I started off using my six hat methods. It was okay. The more I thought about topic the less I became attached to the idea. It seemed like a really cool idea at first, but after reading and reading the text and finding more information on the web the less I cared about it. I like the idea how it used different levels of Bloom's taxonomy during lesson, but in a high school math class, unless we are doing something different than the norm I think it would be tough to incorporate it.
    Several other people presented their tips and a lot of them sounded really neat! The song in the classroom idea really sounded cool, I know that there is a big shift to make things more modern and relevant, and I think this would take care of it. The 3-2-1 sounded really good for students to help summarize the idea about a particular book or concept. I think there are several good ones that came out of this, and I'm excited to try these out in the future.

Inquiry

A few weeks ago, we talked about the Inquiry Model for teachers to implement into the classroom teaching structure. I found the lesson to be quite fun, and informational. I enjoyed this type because I could relate to what we were doing, and I can see many ways I would do this in my own teaching.
    Being a "Math" guy, I would give my students a problem that they want to explore. By giving them a topic and would let them explore that said topic in mathematics, and I think that the could enrich their learning experiences, and they would have a deeper and more appreciative view on what they are doing. That is something that they could hold, and own. It would be their finding, something that has a little bit of ownership to it.   

concept attainment model

     I thought this was a really cool idea! I like how we were able to look at object, and make our own decisions on what we thought were key elements of the topic. By doing so I think a teacher could easily see the step and the way that a student/child would go through the process and gather information. If a teacher put a lot of thought into this as well, this could be a key way to look at pre-assessment long with understand what terms, vocab, and other abstract ideas a student would be familiar with.
     Also I like how the teacher can push/glide the students into their thinking and let them make their own connects and they feel more organic, and natural instead of them being told and shown instead of them constructing their own ideas.

    For my "future" class I would really have to think about this. I know it can be done, but with the day to day direct instruction I think it would be hard for students to switch their minds from that to this type of active. It would be refreshing, like jumping into a clear lake in the upper woods of "that place up north" for you buckeye fans. But I would definitely use this in a geometry class, talking about the property of polygons vs other geometry shapes. 

I think this would be neat thing to use, to reiterate, a wake up call to "not-very-fun-sit-still-and-listen-to-me-ramble-on-about-math" and let the students think and make decisions for them selves.

Graffiti style or Jigsaw style of Cooperative Learning in my own classroom

I think I could use both styles, I would use each for a different lesson. For the graffiti style I think I would use it more for a def. or a theorems. That each group could post their ideas about the lesson/ come up with their own def. and then we could summarize it. I find that this could be used also for solving problem, and many other types.

For the Jigsaw I have done this type of lesson before, but for math I would have to think outside the box a little bit. If it was for sometype of job/career then I think it would be easy that the groups could share and then pair up after.

Overall I think that these are both great ideas, I like the graffiti idea better, and plan on using it more in the future than the jigsaw.