For my technology IEP I didn’t have a lot of options. The math class that I taught was calculus (which gives a lot of possibilities), but in the classroom that I was teaching there was not much as far as technology was concerned. There were basically two white boards, markers and desks and chairs. So I made the best out of it that I could, and made my lesson plans to work with the two white boards and graphing calculators that are needed for calculus. I felt little uneasy doing a technology assignment about using white boards, but that was what I had. In the trig class that runs during the same time as the calculus class, the other math teacher has a tablet pc and a projector. So, I feel like the methods that I used in forming and implementing these lessons could easily be translated to a pc tablet and made available for print and online.
When I first started giving lessons in calculus, I only had one white board and I noticed how long it took to get through a lesson, so I found another white board to use. For better understanding of the situation I should illustrate what the white boards looked like and their structure. The first board that I had was made of wood and had wheels. It was nice a nice board, except it wasn’t very sturdy so every time you wrote something it would wobble. It was like trying to write on a solid wall in an earthquake. The second board that I brought into the classroom had a metal frame and was very sturdy, but it wasn’t mobile.
So, when I first got both my method of usage was to just write across the boards until I ran out of room and then would go back to the beginning of the boards like my college math professors would do, but I felt that it was too sloppy. After some thinking and experimenting with the boards I decided that it was best if I wrote all the theorems and properties (basically all the notes) on what I called board #1 and work examples with the class on board #2. I chose board #1 as the “notes” board, because I was doing a lot less writing and erasing on board #1. I used board #2 as the “example” board since it was more sturdy and easier to write on. I found that this made the class move much more smoothly and efficiently. After I figured this out I built lesson plans for “logarithmic, exponential and other transcendental functions” around this and then implemented them during a month and a bit (it took longer then I thought due to student travel and school vacations). I got great use out of those two boards and it made the class much smoother both for the students and me. Check out my lesson plans below to see my method.
It should be noted that during these lesson plans we used graphing calculators every class, if there wasn’t graphing to be done there was certainly formulas that needed to be programmed in and used. In these lesson plans there were no programs needed, but in the lessons preceding there were.
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