It’s A New Season for STEM Education

Over the past 5 years, my thoughts on my teaching have changed drastically. I now understand in order to reach students I must change. I must continue to be open to new possibilities. Education is swiftly changing with the introduction of free Open Source educational materials. This summer I had an opportunity to attend the first Open Education Conference in the country  -http://www.openedjam.org Open Education simply means free high quality resources for educators and in this day of technology free is definitely good. One of the many take aways of the conference was my introduction to https://www.opened.io/#!  . This online resource makes available assessments that are aligned to common core and the alignment to Texas TEKS will be added soon. This resource includes formative assessments in the form of games, activities and videos. In addition, through this resource, teachers can track student progress.

 I spoke shared information about www.ck12.org . These resources enables educators to edit existing math and science textbooks, use pre-made quizzes or create personalized quizzes,  In addition, this resource includes real world lesson ideas, videos, and study aids.

 I do not know a great deal about Open Education so I am enrolling in a class through Stanford University http://goo.gl/xSkjqq  I recently complete a course –How to learn Math for Students-https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115-S/Spring2014/about   This class was very eye opening for me as an educator. It explored many misconceptions able learning math. 

I am very excited about the opportunity to teach next year.  I plan to incorporate new found techniques and activities for students. This year I will be including Texas Instruments handheld technology in order to deliver activities and real-world lessons to my students.   

The use of Edmodo  is important because I can send assignments from www.ck12.org   to my students while they are in the Edmodo platform. The assignments are graded through the ck12 platform and the results are delivered to me in my Edmodo account.  

Yes, this year will prove to be challenging for me. My hope is that my excitement about new knowledge will spill over to my students.