Overview

The Argument for Digital Artifacts in Mathematics Education

The goal of this blog is two-fold. The first is to organize my lessons and instructional materials into one centrally located place that I can access from any device. Second, to allow potential employers the opportunity to examine my philosophy of teaching, understand my goals as an educator, and to view my body of work in relation to teaching Tennessee state standards. 

It is my belief that students who have the opportunity to create 'things' digitally have a powerful learning tool at their disposal.  They have something that they can return to that reinforces the key idea that they can be successful at math.  Too many times I've heard, "I can't do this," or "Math is too hard." If they had created an online artifact on understanding the difference between irrational and rational numbers then they would have proof positive that they can be successful at mathematics.  So, what would an online artifact look like?

In the course of creating this online PowerPoint, students would have an opportunity to create, collaborate, and, perhaps most importantly, edit.  Creating this artifact should take about a week with no more than seven to nine slides.  The skeleton of the presentation could be created in a day! With an email from the instructor, the directions for completion could be cut and pasted to the first page of their presentation.  Voila! Now the teacher can circulate around the room offering suggestions for improvement, ideas regarding resources, and encouraging students to take ownership of their own learning.

But PowerPoints are sooo boring.  Agreed.  When done poorly a PowerPoint presentation on irrational numbers might be used as a form of torture in some uncivilized part of the world, however, when done well, PowerPoints can be a powerful means of presenting information. I would argue that by continually editing their PowerPoints over the course of two weeks, (or longer) students will reinforce their own ideas more concretely.

Once the project is done and graded, students will have something to go back to.  Something that they created, used their own words to describe; something that has value to them because it was created by them.