Pinterest and Diigo

This week, I started working with Pinterest and Diigo. There's many features to them, including highlighting text, using multiple tags, and copying and pasting. Diigo allow you to enable sticky notes in it so that you can allow other people to comment while Pinterest is a little easier with that function.

There's ways of interacting with your audience with comments and messages. Pinterest is a little more useful in the way that it will redirect you to sites.

Honestly, I would use Pinterest, but not too much. When I worked in a daycare, there were many ideas. As a high school math teacher, there's some information, but I tend to put all of my websites archived in my Google classroom and bookmarks.

Educate teachers first in the present

First, watch this video:

Disclaimer: I am obviously interested in technology, but I just had to make a video reaction myself:

After making this video, I realized my audio isn't the greatest, but hopefully you were able to distinguish my major points.

1. Test scores do not equate to the "best teaching practices". We have to look at curriculum and teaching practices based on our specific student groups.
2. Entertaining students does not necessarily change the content that we have to teach. A good teacher tries her best to engage students, but not all students will always feel that the subject is interesting.
3. Schools should be working more with teachers to slowly introduce technology rather than require it for all teachers and then scrambling later.

Tweeting your students...

One of the recommended videos for this week was The Social Media Revolution (2011). You can either click on it above or you can watch it below:

Do you love social media? How do you use it in your life? Do you use it with students?

Although I am really interested in using technology to help my students learn, I personally feel that as educators, we need to be extremely cautious of the blurred lines that can occur with social media.

The type of communication with our minor students should be able to be completely monitored by our schools and companies. Yes, many people use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to communicate with others. However, many of these accounts are really designed for mostly personal reasons, and are not really accounts created by the school for the school.

Email can be more easily monitored by a school. I wouldn't only have access into my account; other people would be able to make sure my communication is appropriate with students. When it stated in the video that we are going to go away from giving out email addresses to students, I feel that this may not be the right direction to go in. Communication within the school (and about the school) should be monitored by the school.

Two Ways to Use Blogs Video :)

This is my first YouTube video about this topic, so I hope you enjoy! :)

Two Ways to Use Blogs

In the mathematical classroom, students are constantly learning new methods of solving problems. Embedded within the solution can be challenging words.

For ESOL students, there can be an inherent difficulty with picking up the language plus also understanding the mathematical concepts. Since specific terminology is used to describe the order of problem solving methods, students that are ESOL may not initially be able to interpret the order of the steps.

Additionally, depending on the country, different rudimentary mathematical concepts such as adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing can be shown in drastically different ways.

Therefore, for my ESOL students, there are two ways to use blogs within the classroom:

1. Use it as a clarification tool. Students need to have the ability to synthesize their information from a variety of sources, and this may start with the initial instruction wtih the teacher. Each day, I could post a general description of the solution plus also include a video that may describe it in a different manner. Then, ESOL students can use closed captioning, slow down the video, or repeat different parts of the video to help aid in the learning process. I can also include a question that encourages the students to describe another way of thinking about the problem or draw similarities among other problems that were solved in previous classrooms.

2. Students create their own collection of methods that help them learn. This can clearly be seen in the self-monitoring standard of ESOL.  Self-guided learning can often be the best method of learning. Thus, students should be encouraged to find the resources that help them learn the best. With more schools adopting Chromebooks and iPads, the focus should not always be on the teacher to create the blog or archive all of the possible mathematical methods. Instead, as educators, we should be striving to help students make these connections for themselves.

Joy can be derived in the learning process when it "clicks" or when the content connects with the personal learning style of the student, making an imprint on the student's memory. Teachers need to allow the students to explore and find what methods make the most sense.


Students with ESOL need to have the guide of the active teacher, but also know the other resources online that will help them toward success.