Journal Entry Week 7

This week my partner and I got a chance to teach our class about GeoGebra. We came up with three assignments that represent a good introduction into the GeoGebra program. Our first assignment, title Learning GeoGebra, was comprised of two tasks with several steps each. We wanted the students to get feel for how to navigate around the icons. There are several icons to be used and functions that can be plugged into the input bar that the students needed a chance to experience before trying anything too difficult with the program. The second assignment was all about one of our favorite and important components of the program the sliders. We were amazed at these and wanted our students to work with them right away. The third assignment was to incorporate calculus into the assignment by working with tangents and derivatives. In the first assignment, the students were working a little with the input bar and functions, so we wanted to elaborate and show some of the functions that can be used with GeoGebra.

After our revisions, prior to teaching, we felt like our assignments were completely ready for the class. Our first plan was to read through our directions and make them as easy to read as possible, and work through our assignments ourselves to make sure we were making the directions easy enough for everyone to follow. After going over the GSP module, I realized that pictures are a necessity for our assignments. I know that it can be difficult to know what your screen is supposed to look like, therefore we took pictures of the graphs on our screens that way students can see what they may be doing right or wrong without our constant watch.

During our teaching, it made me realize just how important it is to make easy to follow directions. Even though I thought our directions made sense, some of the students still had some problems with the directions. So, what I have learned to do is read through my own directions multiple times and try and learn what I think my audience will understand. I think it's important to know your audience and how much they know, which will help me to make the appropriate directions. I did enjoy making the assignments and learning how students react to certain directions. I'm looking forward to making my own module.