Nature You Say? More Like Mathure

                 This is it, the last one, the moment of truth, the big one, the last straw, the big show, the last whoora, the big finale, my last math blog post (for now). There will be no lady singing, but after publishing this I have to say a smile has not left my face. It is not that I didn’t enjoy creating my posts, it is more like a sense of accomplishment, I have made it this far.

                I brainstormed many ideas as to what I wanted to talk about in my last post, but the topic of this week’s online portion of class gave me a lot to work with. It is very easy to find math in our daily lives, highlighting these real world connections to the topics in math class is the ultimate way instructors can promote student engagement. I really liked the videos we watched about how math is the ultimate designer in nature. Nature is math, it’s all about symmetry and relationships based on number patterns.

Retrieved from https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wvAXzlHpSs8/maxresdefault.jpg on October 28th, 2017

                One of my favourite words to say is Biomimicry, which is scientific approach to innovation that aims to crate sustainable solutions to human challenges by imitating designs and patterns we see in nature. The idea behind this is the belief that nature has already solved many of the problems we face, their solutions are time tested (because of time itself). Nature has used this time to do all the math for us, and we as society are starting to take notice of this more and more. Biomimicry.org goes outlines how biomimicry is changing our lives for the better, improving our designs of the innovative things people are doing all over the world. One of my favourite examples is how a bird’s beak made the fastest train in the world, even faster. The Shinkansen Bullet Train in Japan travels at 200 miles per hour, but when it first hit the tracks, the speed at which it traveled produced thunder like claps every time it left a tunnel, making many people very mad. Engineers used the design of the Kingfisher bird’s beak, who dives into water with a minuscule splash, to redesign the front of the train. This change, made only possible because of the things we learned from nature,  got rid of the thunderous clap, improved electricity use by 15% and made the fastest train in the world, 10% faster. 

Examples of Biomimicry

Biomimicry is combining biology and technology, nature can help us help others even more. Behind all types of science and design, there is math. Behind any phenomenon in nature, there is pattern and symmetry, which is math. These realization fuel my belief that students need to be exposed to more and more real-world applications in math class via blended learning designs. Science and math are two subjects that I believe can be symbiotic in the classroom, teaching one with the other. It also makes me very excited to teach math and science in my upcoming practicum, as I have the opportunity to practice these types of strategies in my class.

                Before I taught math, I was not a math person. I didn’t get the math gene from my mother, the accountant, that’s what I use to always say. I never considered myself a math person, I don’t think I do yet either. What I do consider myself is a teacher, an educator who has the opportunity to provide students with an array of experiences in math class due to my lack of a mathematical background. I never want my students to be the only one learning in my class, the best math classes to me are ones based on overall discovery and teaching for all parties involved, me included.  My future students only have two jobs to do in my classes. The first is to try, and the second is to be kind. Whatever they do after that is a bonus.

Thanks for reading,

Mr. Primeau 

Putting Learning into the Blender

Hello Math friends,

It has been a bit of time since my last post. We had a week of flexing, then reading, and now we are back to the grind, the home stretch. This week we continued to focus on new and exciting teaching strategies we can use in our upcoming placement. We focused specifically on blended learning this week, and how we as teachers can use technology better in the classroom.

Our classrooms are becoming more and more connected to the real-world via technology, which is allows educators to extend the reach of their learning past their school walls as well as out of their hands as it is a main way to develop more student centered learning. When it comes to the use of technology in my classrooms, math focused or not, I tend to look at the use of technology as somewhat effective. I believe technology is routinely used as a distraction for students after they have finished their required work. Instead, using technology in the class needs to enrich an improve understanding instead of just take up time.

Retrieved from https://goo.gl/5bzU2F on October 21, 2017 

That notion if woven into SAMR, which is a model designed to help educators infuse technology into teaching and learning. It enables teachers to gauge how technology is utilized in classrooms. The focus is on how technology is changing the learning for students and not the technology itself, which is crucial for using tech in math class. SAMR is an acronym for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. Each word describes how technology can be used in order to alter how the students learn and execute and activity. I really liked the ideas behind the Augmentation aspect of the SAMR Model, as it focused on how students can use technology to improve how they complete a task, without changing the original task. An example of this would be having students use some of the iPad’s built in tools such as the thesaurus, dictionary or speak mode to augment the classroom task. Allowing he students to alter how they get to their final result of a task could allow for more students engagement as they feel more in control over their learning.

           Below is a helpful link for those who want to know more about SAMR model, and how to approach any lesson across any discipline with this way of thinking in mind.

Transforming Lessons Using the SAMR Model

The SAMR model is just one of the strategies we focused on that taught us how to blend our learning for our students. I consider the whole idea of blended learning as being a great background ideal to have when doing any long range planning. We routinely hear about how our brains are muscles and they get stronger the more we use them, like regular muscles. I can take this thinking a little bit further, focusing on the importance of confusion. When training your muscles, it is important to embrace muscle confusion by completing different variations of an exercise, as your muscles can get bored with a certain way of doing something, which makes the action itself less effective. This way of thinking describes why blended learning is so important. Not that is creates confusion, but it allows students to answer, complete and conduct various activities and tasks, many ways. Blended learning models like SAMR allows me as a teacher to design lessons and tasks that ask my students to use many different skills instead of just relying on one or two.

I will be remembering the SAMR model for long time now, because I think it is a great tool to use while in the beginning stages of unit and long range planning.

Thanks for reading,

Mr. Primeau