Online Education Experience

The Online Experience Guidelines are interesting and completely reasonable, and I owe it to my students to implement more of these experiences into my classroom.  Currently, my school offers online classes on  Odyssesyware, which I teach, and a Careers class which has an online piece.  Ultimately, I want to offer online instruction for my math classes, and I can see online simulations, gaming, test preparation, and blogging as useful tools.

There are a variety of websites that offer free online simulations and games, such as techtrekers.com and http://phet.colorado.edu/ that offer many practical situations involving money, graphing, solving equations and linear programming, just to name a few.  Test preparation used to cost big bucks.  Now, you can go online to saab.org and algebrahelp.com and get kids ready for a variety of tests.  I have already started a blog on a website to help students with their math. 

An assignment that I'd like to do online is a linear programming problem involving maximizing profit on shoes.  I would start with a KWL asking about profit, linear inequalities, linear programming, etc, and perhaps a PowerPoint StAir would be useful where I have them practice the skills.  Then, I would have them use some sort of tactile object, like Legos, so they can touch and visualize what they're working with and have them enter data into a Google Docs spreadsheet.  Next, I would have them use the data to determine an optimization equation and inequalities that represent constraints.   The blog would be useful for students and me helping each other with similar problems assigned for practice.

The possibilities are great, but the hard part about using technology is the fact that I have nothing but scientific calculators.  It would be very difficult to fulfill the Michigan Merit guidelines unless I had a ratio of no worse than 2 student to 1 computer, if not 1 to 1, in my classroom.  Since many of my students do not have home computers, I do not feel I can give assignments that require use of the Internet nor do I feel comfortable sending kids to a lab without me there.  Unfortunately, our labs are used all of the time w/ Odysseyware so I can't barge in an take over the lab.  I'm enthusiastic about tech in schools, but kids can't use what they don't have.