Reflection 6

There are many connections that can be made between manipulation and the ISTE Technology Standards. Manipulation is used for the students. It is based around students and helps them to better understand different concepts. Not only does it do that, but it also helps students have a better relationship with technology. It allows them to get more acquainted with technology and the concepts their learning. Manipulatives can be used to follow several of the standards. Including communication, creativity, and solving real world problems while using technology. So, therefore, manipulation is used for both the technology sake and to build students' academic skills.

Manipulation Resources

http://www.webgraphing.com/graphing_advanced.jsp

This web site can be used for graphing, analyzing and comparing equations. This program also shows where graphs are increasing and decreasing. This application will allow students to visualize the equation they are working with and provide a geometric perspective to their algebra work. While the program requires membership for the full benefits, it is free to sign up and use for students and teachers.

http://www.emints.org/ethemes/resources/S00000592.shtml

This website has an entire collection of manipulation activities. The activities range for grades 6,7,8. Students will get work with fractions, decimals, graphs, tessalations, and many other things. While this may seem inappropriate for many secondary teachers, the activites can be modified to fit courses of appropriate level. For example, the problem of the spinner can relate directly to work with probability. Also, some of the links provide material on lessons for an entire class period and some lessons encouraged the use of technology like the Smartboard.

http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/

Again, this is a massive list of interactive lessons that can be used by teachers. The subject matter varies and there are multiple activities per subject. In particular, students direct a robot through a mine field laid out the cartesian plane. Its a list of fun activities that allow students to visualize the math they are working with.

All of these are about engagement and keeping the student invloved and focused. These are all great activities that will be useful for all of us.

And for the standards, manipulation can apply to anything and everything. All of these activites are supplements to actual lesson and there is a lesson for everything. The manipulation activities are here for students to reinforce their learning. Their learning comes from the standards, so its hard to inculde working with manipulations in the standards.

Math Manipulatives

http://mason.gmu.edu/~mmankus/Handson/manipulatives.htm

This website has several different resources that can be printed off and hand made for different math classes. For example, it includes base ten blocks, base five blocks, a reference for making paper fractions, graph paper, and polar graph paper. This website is a good reference for teachers who want to use tangible objects in the classroom. Students can use these to help better their knowledge in certain areas.

http://mathforum.org/trscavo/geoboards/

This website uses geoboards as manipulatives in the classroom. It has several different useful lesson plans that teachers can use. It tells teachers how to use the geoboards in the classroom so that the students get the full effect from them. It talks about two-dimensional geometry objects such as parallelograms, triangles, and squares. Along with that, it has dot paper with different dimensions that teachers can download, print off, and use in the classroom. It talks about how using the geoboards helps students strengthen their understanding of finding area as well. It shows different shapes that can be used for the activity of finding area.


illuminations.nctm.org/ActivitySearch.aspx

This is probably the best website I found. It has great math resources for students of all ages. You can select the grade level you wish to view. You can also enter in the subject you wish to find. Once you do this, it takes you to a page with numerous games and activities that helps you learn certain math concepts. For example, I selected the grade level 9-12 and clicked on the first option you gave me which was a game about the spread of a fire. It is used to better understand probability. Teachers can use this in the classroom to help students strengthen their understanding in numerous areas. Students could enjoy these activities while having fun and learning at the same time.

Reflection 6

My team topic connects with almost all of the ISTE standards because the nature of our topic is so expansive. I do think that some have a more direct connection than others. Manipulatives can help students discover basic operations and concepts, but it can be easy for these concepts to get lost in the process of the manipulations. I feel that manipulation connects to standard 3 the most. They are using these technology tools to enhance their learning. By manipulating and seeing how math is actually working, manipulatives can further understanding and help students pose questions that they might not have previously considered. I also think that standard 6 relates to our topic. By taking a topic they know a little bit about, and applying that knowledge to do some manipulations definitely helps students with problem solving strategies and decision making.

Manipulation Resources

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html

This is one of the best websites I've found. It is a forum of virtual manipulatives. They have it really well organized so that you can easily find exactly what you're looking for. The manipulatives are categorized by content standard and by grade level. You can search the content standard at all grade levels, the grade level using all the standards, or you can pick a specific standard and grade level. Each manipulative has a link that has parent/teacher information. This is extremely helpful because they list the objectives, lesson plan, extension activities, assessment, and the materials that go along with the manipulative. Another nice bonus is that each manipulative can be translated into spanish.

http://www.explorelearning.com/
This page is a collection of “gizmos” that help in teaching a lesson. It is very well organized, so finding a gizmo for a specific lesson is easy. From the home page there are two drag down menus, one is math, one is science. By using the math menu, you can pick grade levels and then choose a math type.
You may need to install shockwave player, but its worth it because these gizmos are a really good addition to any lesson.

http://www.ct4me.net/math_manipulatives.htm

This website is good because it has a short introduction section that defines what a manipulative is, the pros and cons of manipulatives, and what role manipulatives play in the classroom. After that there is a list of manipulatives that they find to be helpful. It isn't as organized as the first website I listed, but they do break them up into categories like basic computation, algebra, calculus, and statistics. This website also has links to a lot of other helpful things for teachers, some being math projects, software, news, and journals.