In this showcase, you will find examples of artifacts I created while in the Master of Arts in Educational Technology (MAET) program. I have chosen sample artifacts that have influenced the way I design my classroom and my teaching. These creations highlight three important aspects for educators to consider every day: Learning, Instruction, and Assessment.
Below, you will find a description of each artifact. By clicking on the picture associated with each artifact description, you will see my full creation.
Below, you will find a description of each artifact. By clicking on the picture associated with each artifact description, you will see my full creation.
Learning
Learning is at the heart of pedagogy, and I want my students to be able to do their best learning possible in my classroom. Through the MAET, I read research about many aspects of learning. These artifacts show how I help my students do their best learning through three of these research-based practices.
Learning Space Re(Design)The way I arrange my classroom affects my students' experiences. I used SketchUp, a designing software, to create my ideal classroom. This artifact shows my ability to design the learning space for my students. With some thrifting over a summer, I was able to make quite a bit of this design happen. I got the two extra tables in the back, the fake plants, the lamps, the rug, and the beanbags to help improve the environment in which my students learn every day. These changes produced a calmer learning environment and new collaboration options.
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Why Maker Education Belongs in the Math ClassroomThe maker movement, which has been around for less than ten years, promotes learning through creative production in a social context. This movement is quickly gaining traction and becoming a culture. Maker education is engaging, interactive, and collaborative: all things I want my classroom to be. In this infographic I created, I explain how maker education ties to the mathematical practice standards as outlined in the Common Core Standards. Creating this artifact helped me develop my design skills. My hope is that this infographic will inspire others to incorporate maker education into their math classrooms!
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Failure as a Learning ModeAllowing failure to be as powerful a learning mode as success is a wicked problem. Schools are set up to reward success and penalize failure, but we can learn from failure and are expected to do so throughout life. In this infographic, I explain the problem, what perpetuates the problem, and what I learned from researching this problem. Creating this infographic developed my research skills in relationship to wicked problems. The research that I found also convinced me to use standards-based grading in my classroom to focus students and parents on the learning associated with grades.
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Instruction
I aim to provide my students with the highest quality instruction every day. These three artifacts are lesson plans that I created in the MAET program. These lessons contain the amount of technology appropriate for the content.
21st Century Lesson PlanThis lesson integrates technology to support student understanding. The goal of this lesson is to help students understand what coefficients are and what they do. Without technology, this lesson becomes quite cumbersome as students need to make several graphs to see what the coefficient does. With the aid of Desmos, students will be able to focus on the concept, rather than on the task of creating graph after graph. Making this lesson plan helped me develop mindfulness of when it would be beneficial to integrate technology.
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Maker Lesson PlanIn the summer of 2018, I got a Makey Makey! I played around with it for a while, and decided my students would love it. At the beginning of each school year, I teach collaborative problem solving skills, group roles, and group norms. In this lesson plan, I integrate maker education with my group objectives at the beginning of the year with a Makey Makey. Creating this lesson plan helped me realize the connections between maker education and math education, as well as how they can benefit each other.
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Lesson Plan Aligned with my Personal Theory of LearningThis lesson plan emphasizes teaching for understanding. In the lesson plan, I recognize the importance of prior knowledge because prior knowledge plays a big role in what students understand about new content. I have also designed this lesson to offer students feedback many times in different ways. I partner students very intentionally to make sure they have someone that can help them should they need it. The fraction strips that the students create function as tools that foster fraction sense. I also focus on behavior during this lesson, reinforcing positive behaviors to let my students know what behavior is desired and that undesirable behaviors are unacceptable in my classroom. I created this lesson plan to showcase what I know about how students learn best.
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Assessment
Along with good learning experiences and good instruction, good assessment is absolutely necessary in a classroom. An educator needs a way to see what the students actually learned from a lesson or a unit. Throughout the MAET, I recognized that technology provides unique opportunities and ways to assess students. These two artifacts show two ways that I have learned to assess my students.
Formative Assessment DesignThis is an assessment plan that I designed to determine which of my students do not understand how to find common denominators. Even though finding common denominators is a fifth grade skill, many of my sixth grade students still do not have this skill. I need to know which of my students need more practice. In this formative assessment plan, I describe the purpose for the assessment, the pre-assessment instruction, the assessment, the assessment instructions, the technology, the feedback plan, and the post-assessment instruction. Designing this lesson plan helped me to think through best assessment practices and how they fit in with instruction.
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Game Based AssessmentAs a mathematics teacher, it is easy to assess with paper and pencil quizzes and tests. However, technology gives opportunities to transform the way I assess my students. This game assesses my students' understanding of fraction multiplication. In this game, students have to choose correct answers to fraction multiplication problems by using mathematical models. Some questions provide a model and ask what multiplication problem it represents. Other questions give a real world example that involves fraction multiplication. When a student chooses a correct response, the game lets them know that they correctly solved the problem. When a student chooses an incorrect response, the game provides an explanation, prompting the student to make sense of the problem. This artifact showcases my ability to assess in ways other than paper and pencil quizzes and tests.
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Photo Attribution: Unless otherwise noted, all photos belong to Kaitlyn Chen.