Ryan+Durant

= = = = = = 1201109197 toc =Biography=

= = = = I am a 5th year senior majoring in Secondary Education Mathematics. This is my second year at KU. I transferred from Pittsburg State University, where I was majoring in Business Management. I hope to stay around the Kansas City area for the first couple of years of teaching. I haven't decided whether I want to teach middle or high school. My experience with technology isn't high, but I have had some classes working with computers, and also with writing fortran code. I have recently learned how important and effective technology is in the classroom. I think that students are more knowledgeable when working with technology, and technology is another effective tool to help your students learn material.

My preferred contact method: Email Email address: radurant@ku.edu A disaster I have had with technology was when my sister broke the adapter cord to my regular Nintendo. =Assignments=

Exemplar
Good http://www.columbusnavigation.com/ I used Google to find this website. I think that this website is a good website because it is very easy to navigate and find information. There are links to different pages that have different information, and with the link is small description of the information that is found on the linked page. There are a lot of facts, and numbers that I could work with in order to create math problems that relate to the material being studied. I felt the layout of the page was pretty good. Not a lot of space is used, not making the page too cluttered or unreadable. At the top of the page are links for site map, and site search. I like that this is at the top, so you can quickly type in a question, and get information instead of having to spend a lot of time looking over the whole page trying to find the information you are interested in finding.

Bad http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/1492.exhibit/c-Columbus/columbus.html I used Google to find this website. I think this is a bad site because it is lacking in information about Christopher Columbus. I think that the site should be more specific on the information that it provides if it is not going to have a sufficient amount of information on the topic. I think also that this site has pointless links to enlarged pictures that are also presented on the page under the link. I wouldn’t be able to use this site very well for a math lesson due to the fact that it is lacking in information. I could pull a few questions from the information provided, but the questions would be lacking in content and difficulty for the level of students I am preparing to teach. After looking at the website a little further I was able to find a link to more information that would make the site a little better, but the link is at the bottom of the page making it more difficult to find the information a person may be searching for.

Talk 1 Assignment
Based on the presentations and by reading some of my peers comments I think that some good criteria for evaluating a website are the layout of a website, having enough relative information for the person looking at the site to use and the quality of the content, as well as if there are many ads that may distract the user from finding the information.

I think that Stephanie Filardo’s good website http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/UsaHistory/Columbus/Columbus.htm, was a pretty good website. She liked it because it has a clean look, and students can find information pretty easy and know what information they can expect to learn from each section. I agree that this is important in finding a good website for a classroom teacher to use for his/her students. She also liked that there were links to the different categories as well as links to other information regarding Christopher Columbus. She also liked how the information was direct and to the point, and not so wordy. I agree with her, but I felt that the website was lacking enough content to make a good website, but it makes up for it in having a link to other websites that where more information can be found.

Her bad website, http://www.enchantedlearning.com/explorers/page/c/columbus.shtml, I also think is a bad website for classroom teachers to use for their students. She didn’t like it because it had too much unrelated information at the top of the page; which may be a distraction for students trying to find information. I agree totally that this website has too much other things going on, that anyone, not only students may get distracted away from trying to find information. I also am not a fan of having to pay a fee to use the website without any of the ads, because there are a lot of them.

A link to my wiki
My Wiki

Communities
I chose two social networks to incorporate to work with my wiki, and they are Youtube, and Facebook. With YouTube, I would have my students search for videos relating to some mathematical topic. I would then ask the students how, if possible, could they make the video better to help people understand the mathematical content. Then I would ask them to make a video, either making the video they found better, or explaining a similar topic well enough for people to understand if they were to access the video. I think that by having the students do this project, it allows them to demonstrate that they fully understand a specific topic in math. I want them to do it so it may help further their knowledge of a topic familiar to them already.

I would want the students to use Facebook, because it is a very easy social utility that most students are accustomed to using. I would have the students all become friends and create a group relating to math. I would want the students to post questions, and answers about different math concepts they may find interesting. I think that using Facebook would be good because it is easy to access and use, and allows students to learn outside of their typical means of learning.