Exploring Websites

I explored many websites and came across one in particular that seemed to stand out to me. The Haddonfield Public School website was a nice website that was not too cluttered with information. It has links on the side and at the top for easy navigation. In particular I was very impressed with the high school website. Here you will find links on the left and right hand side that would be useful to parents and students. Everything I have mentioned so far has been common to just about every website that I looked at. The thing that separates this from others is on the left side and it is labeled faculty/staff voicemail, email, and eboards. I really like this page because it has a lot of information for parents and students on the same page. A parent can go to this page and find the email or voicemail for any teacher in the school if they feel the need to contact a particular teacher. Also most teachers have a link for something called an eboard. I am not familiar with these but they seem to be a simple and organized website for the teacher. One specific eboard that I took a look at was the on posted for Ms. Allison Rauso, a math teacher. It is here that students will find information regarding their homework assignments, announcements, and the materials that they need for the course. This is useful because parents can easily go to the website and be aware of exactly what their kids are doing in that particular class. Also students can always check when homework is due or when the next exam will be. Another reason this is good is in the case that a student is absent. It is very easy for the student and parent to see what the student missed. They do not have to wait until they go back to school to find out what they missed. I looked at other eboards and they all have the same format. Teachers choose to put different information in their boxes but they all look relatively the same. I like this idea because students will have many different classes throughout the duration of their high school career. This way students and parents do not have to learn to navigate possibly six different websites each year. There is one very simple design that they can use for every class.

The Road to Becoming a Math Teacher

I have loved math ever since I can remember. As a little kid I was always much more attentive in math class than any of my other classes. My idea of reading the newspaper was by skipping over the articles in the sports section and reading the statistics page. I would memorize the standings of whichever sports were in season and all the box scores from the previous night. If it were baseball season then I would know everybody’s batting average on the Phillies. I was just obsessed with numbers and could not get enough.

As I got older I started to think about what I could do with my love for math. I thought of many different careers such as an actuary, statistician, or engineer but teaching never even crossed my mind. At the end of my junior year of high school I started to visit colleges and I had decided that I wanted to study engineering. I chose engineering because I knew it involved a lot of math and I had two older brothers who had gone to college for engineering. In my senior year of high school I decided to attend Alfred University, a small college in upstate New York.

When I went to Alfred I really thought that I would go there for four years and be an engineer for the rest of my life. But as my freshmen year went on I started to think differently. I was not as interested in the applied mathematics, which was what I was learning as an engineer, as I was in just pure mathematics. I went and saw my advisor and found out that I could become a math major. I also had a change of heart about attending Alfred, so the next year I transferred to Rutgers University in New Brunswick. I became a math major there and I really enjoyed my classes.

I was asked from many different people what I was going to do with my degree after college. I really never knew how to answer these questions because I was just excited to be studying something that I liked. In the fall semester of my second year at Rutgers I saw a work-study position open that would involve working in an elementary school. I am going to be honest when I say that the reason that I applied was because this specific position paid more money than any of the other work-study jobs. I got the job and I began working at Clinton Elementary School in Plainfield two days a week. I was assigned to a third grade teacher and I would help her out during class. This is where I realized that this is what I wanted to do after college ended. I loved working with the kids and I really loved explaining math. I do not remember why but this program was not offered the next semester, so I was back working in a library for the rest of college.

The summer before my senior year I got a job as a driver at a warehouse in Piscataway. I took the job thinking that it was just to make some extra cash over the summer. It turned out that I worked at this place during my senior year and after I graduated I was an assistant manager there. I was making good money and was steadily moving up in the company and I started to think that this was going to be my career. But it did not last long because suddenly I was working all the time and it was not as enjoyable as it once was. I remember one night thinking about what I should do as the stress was building with this job. I remembered that a couple of years back how much I enjoyed working in a school. Soon after I gave my two-week notice and decided to try a career in education.

I started by finding a job at a learning center in Edison and there I tutored math for a couple of years. Since then I have found a job at Rutgers working in a program called ODASIS where I teach and mentor students in Calculus and Pre-calculus. I am in the Prudential Scholar program here at Montclair and I am also in the MAT program for secondary mathematics. I have also taught a Saturday SAT program at Rutgers for New Brunswick High School students. I have enjoyed all the teaching and tutoring that I have done so far and look forward to graduating in May and starting to teach in a high school next fall.

Thoughts on Technology

Within the last year I bought a macbook, smart phone, joined facebook and twitter. That is where my technology background begins and ends. Although I do not have much of a background in technology, I think it can be very useful in the classroom. I recently attended a technology seminar at Montclair and was fascinated by all the different ways to bring technology to the classroom. One thing that I took from the seminar immediately was the use of twitter. I never really understood the idea behind twitter and was never really interested in reading about what someone else was doing all day long. But I learned that a social network such as twitter is a great place to share ideas. I can connect to other math teachers and find great ideas for lessons and view feedback about ideas I have. The best part of these types of communities is that they stretch across the globe.

In the article "The World is Integrated!", it was suggested that teachers from different disciplines can come together and create an integrated curriculum for the students. This is such a great idea. Students go to school each day and wander from class to class without realizing how these subjects are connected. In the working world there is not much of a distinction between these subjects and the major subjects taught in school can all be applied to just about every job out there. This division in school is not really preparing the students for life after high school. The students need the opportunity to make connections between these subjects and more importantly they need to make a connection between their subjects and their individual interests. Technology can help this be possible. Even if we are unable to find other teachers in our school to help us integrate the curriculum, we have access to a nearly unlimited number of teachers out there that are willing through the use of technology.

Students today are very different than when I was in high school, which was only ten years ago. Most students are very savvy when it comes to technology and then they come to school and are forced not to use everything that they are familiar with. Something as simple as a powerpoint presentation can have more of an effect on these types of students than writing the same information on the chalkboard. In the video it was mentioned that we need to connect the real world to the curriculum. This is very important. Technology makes it very easy for students to connect the current curriculum to something they are interested in. I am a math teacher and I can think of so many different ways to connect math to things students could be interested in. For example, a student may be an artist and love his/her art class but hate coming to math. What if I allowed the student to do a project showing me how math and art are connected? Through the use of technology the student could make a presentation showing that many artists use what is called the golden ratio in order to do their paintings or drawings. This is just one example of how math and art are related. I feel as though these types of projects can be used to supplement our standard teaching of math and it can be much more effective.

This course can be a tool that I can use to effectively bring technology to my classroom. I am already much more comfortable using the GROUPS and PBWORKS websites than I was just a week ago. These websites along with the blog should allow us to share many ideas and can help us all make strides toward becoming a better teacher.