Fractional Reflections…

reflection by rudecactus

 

A reflection on my fraction help final project.  

Now that I look back on my idea I have one simple thought – “What was I thinking!” Somehow my fairly straight forward project has taken on a life of its own…  

I started with the idea of a digital lesson page for adding fractions – an area in which I know my adult students have a lot of trouble and would benefit from having access to extra help either in the classroom or at home.  I thought about the different tools we had explored in this class. Slideshare would provide an easy link to a slide show I could narrate, but I couldn’t animate the examples they way I wanted. A video could work, but I would need a properly lit area to film, and it would be difficult to properly show the examples I wanted to use.  I decided to create my lessons in MS PowerPoint even though I had been having difficulties posting these files (hence the video of my introductory PowerPoint on YouTube…). I went with PowerPoint because it allowed me the flexibility to animate my lessons in time with my narration in a way I thought would be most beneficial to the learners viewing them. I think I managed to do this, but I had to provide a link for people to download a free viewer because for some unknown reason, these files wouldn’t automatically play, even though that it what they were supposed to do… However, they would play in PowerPoint so the idea, even if awkwardly executed, still worked.  

As I fleshed out the idea, I realized I needed to expand my idea to include other lessons. An introduction to fractions was needed for those who didn’t have the basic knowledge of what fractions were, and since I was expanding the idea anyway, I planned for sections on subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions as well. After reflecting on my methodology, I though that digital lessons were not enough, and expanded each section again to include links to online lessons to back up my lessons, links to printable practice sheets and online practice and links to online games to have fun and reinforce the concepts being taught. My straight forward idea had grown more complex and I was now making plans for 5 different sections involving 13 digital PowerPoint lessons with links for each lesson. I’m afraid I overreached a bit… each digital lesson took me from 5 – 7 hours to make. I finished 11 of the 13, but I have run out of time to finish the last 2 as I have probably put in close to 100 hours working on my page (and boy, do I hope people find the site useful or my time would have been better spent elsewhere…). I do plan to finish them, but it will be sometime after Christmas. Another feature I intended to implement was a blog page to answer fraction questions or to ask for help with something not covered on the site. Again, this will have to wait, but in the mean time, I have included the Wolframalpha search engine. Students can type in their equation, and a step by step solution can be found. It works for all kinds of questions (and even will graph parabolas), so I think this provides a speedier short-term solution.   I intend to expand the site over the coming years, and I hope to cover a lot of the Level 1, 2 and 3 Adult Basic Education Math Curriculum and integrate the links provided in these documents as well as create more lessons. Maybe someone will toss some funding my way and I can purchase a program to convert the PowerPoints into videos, I mean a guy can dream can’t he?  

I did encounter some difficulties in setting up my site. Game selection was a challenge. I tried to select games that would be fun and not just provide repetitive drill as discussed in our Gaming in Education class lecture given by Sylvia Martinez, but fun fraction games are tough to find… I really like the concentration (matching) game for equivalent fractions.  I found it fun and my students found it helped them to become more adept at recognizing fractions with the same value. Fishy Fractions is good for a variety of fraction skills practice, but is very repetitive after a while. I am hoping that others will submit links to great games so I can improve on the ones that I have found (calling Sylvia… ).  

Another area that has caused some difficulty is editing the wiki page. I realize that I am getting the site for free, but it could definitely benefit from a greater range editing tools and it would be nice if the site left spaces I put in, or actually formatted the font the way I selected, rather than taking out the spaces or randomly changing font formats… It has been a little frustrating. If only Wikispaces would give free upgrades to all educators, not just those in the K-12 system…  

Feedback is an additional area of concern. I created a survey in Google Docs (love it by the way) and linked it to the site, but as of today, I have only 3 submissions and all of them were from my students (and strangely enough, I got good ratings)… I also have a few verbal comments from others who have checked out the site and they have been positive, including a “fun” comment from a co=workers 9 year old, but nothing much in writing. I checked the statistics on the wiki and there have been over 100 unique visitors to the site in November, but people don’t take the time to give feedback. I am beginning to understand why there are all those offers of a chance to win a prize for filling out a survey… I know we are all busy, and I myself am guilty of not checking out many of our projects, so I tried to think of other ways to solicit feedback. I emailed the link to all the Basic Ed teachers at SIIT, I sent out a Tweet with a fraction help tag, I bookmarked the site on Delicious, tagged the site with many fraction related terms. However, after last nights class on sharing with Dean Shareski, I finally had a revelation on the proper use of Twitter - I went to the Twibes site, and tweeted applicable math related Twibes and asked them to check out the site and give feedback. Hopefully this will provide some results to improve the site.  

Overall, as much work as this project has been, I am glad I did it. I have had a chance to put into practice some of the concepts we have been learning about, I have become a little more tech savvy about available tools, I have created a resource for my students, school and anyone else who wants to use it – my own little piece of open education and information sharing. I fully intend to maintain this site and add to it in the future. Hopefully others will like it and use it as a resource as well.  

Take care!  

Greg

Advertisement

Tags: eci831