Presentations in History

This is a list of things to follow and watch out for while making presentations because otherwise you be following the mistakes of the past. For more ideas of what not to do check out office.com/slidefest

1. Overly complicated information and graphs can making the presentation boring.
2. If you have to explain what the chart means then it is too complicated
3. Simple bullets are better than having many on one page.
4. If pictures can make the point use them instead of bullets.
5. Have slide pictures support what you going to say people do not like to watch you read.
6. Save all printouts of extra information and slide printout tell the end of the presentation.
7. Over the top slide transitions can distract from the presentation.
8. Only use transitions when changing sections or topics not between every slide.
9. Don’t use major graph pictures as backgrounds. 
10. Make sure the presentation is seeable at a distance.

Jigsaw Method

Here is a reason to have 5-7 computers in any classroom with the main reason of share learning, other words jigsaw learning. I would want students to learn formulas and math skills as a group for the whole reason that when they grow up they are mostly going to be in a group setting at work. So each group of students have one computer in which each person in the group is given a randomly pick job to finish for the group. Now depending on the activity or project would depend on how much time on the computer the students get. I liked how the website Jigsaw said to have the students with the same task meet together before going to their own group. This is something I would like to add to teachers plans who plan to do this.

The advantage to this method is that it encourages listening, engagement, working as a team, depending on other, and efficiently learning the material. However, like all things in the world there bound to be some draw back somewhere. This method can have obstacles when there is a dominant student, and this can be fixed by making a leader of the group that is responsible for being fair and spreading participation evenly. Then you have a slow student can also cause problems, therefore the hope is that in the "expert" group (where the people with the same topic meet) that student can get help for others in the same topic and push them to getting better reports. The last down side is that Jigsaw can be an uphill battle if it is used in older kids that have never used it before because they might fight back.

WebQuests

Webquest.org is a website with online lessons that have information or sources for the students to work with instead of spending all their time looking for it. WebQuests start out with an introduction that relates to the students interests. A teacher's goal is to make it fun and interesting for the student so they want to move on to tasks. This area will should what the students has to accomplish to get to the end of the quest. As the students work on the quest they can click process which shows them a step-by-step description of what should be done to successfully complete the project. If the student gets stuck or needs some more information they can click on the resource page with shows all the links to relevant websites they can find that information on.  Now any quest need a rubric to evaluate the students work, and that is where the evaluation tap comes in. It shows a clear guideline of what is considered excellent work and what is minimum accepted. The last thing show up in the quest window is conclusion which shows what the student has learned. From my playing around in this website, I have learned that it be fun for students and easy to use. If might be something to look into for students to use in class.

Proofs in High School Geometry

Journal Number 1

                Thinking back to my first time taking geometry in middle school, I never had any proof lesions.  When I changed school districts for high school I was made to take geometry a second time. This time I got one week of two-column proofs.  I decided at that time I hated proofs because they were hard to understand with all the pressure to learn them in one week.  However the story does not end there, I joined Boise State and took Math 187 my first semester here. This being a proof class was like walking into hell for me. Half the things the teacher started with I did not understand, and she was always saying I should already know the basics because if was part of high school geometry.   Except high school geometry for me was 11 years ago, and I could not remember any of that week in hell. Needless to say I having to take Math 187 a second time, in which this time I can understand it.

                Taking my experience into account, I would say all high-school geometry needs to have at least one month of each type of proof: paragraph and two-column.  Why do I say both? The reason is that I fell two-column proofs are a good start point for a beginning student. It helps To see where everything is going. One good example is by a Doctor Alicia, who shows that not only in math do you see two-column proofs but that they can also be used by a prosecuting attorney (Math forum, 2000). If you give the students this skill they can use it for other things very easily and bring it to things outside  of the math class. The  reason I would like to see a month of two-column proof (at least) is because during my experience one week just made proofs that much harder to understand because I did not have the time to grasp it in my hands.

                Now this leaves the question why would I say that we should also have one month of paragraph proof?  My reasoning is that if the student was to go into other math classes they well most likely see paragraph form. They need to have the basics of this form for those classes. Since the student already had the first "beginning " level proofs it just a matter of getting them to understand the movement of this vision. I like Doctor Ian point that if the proof writer just writes up a bad proof, or writes down an assumed result as proof, then the next writer might use that bad write up (Math forum, 2000).  This would just make chaos.

                Overall I wish I had more experience in proof writing before I got to college.  If I had just these two months of "basic" proof writing when I was in high school, I believe my college experience would have been better.

Source:

Math Forum (2000) Value of two-column proofs Retrieved 9-2-11 from http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52353.html