Overview
Curator: Debbie Watson
Description of Resource: Math = Love is a blog by a teacher named Sarah (Hagan) Carter. Her blog includes posts about her classroom and the activities that students are completing in her class.
Technical & Cost considerations: The resources available on her blog are free, and she attaches all of them to her posts about the lessons or activities. She has also created a page for each of the subjects that she teaches and has attached all of her resources to content specific pages on her website. Her activities can all be accessed through her blog and she has the option to download them directly from the post or a dropbox.
Evaluation
1. Learning Activity Types
- LA-Present - In her blog, Sarah Carter, provides lesson plan ideas complete with activities and interactive notebook foldables and resources for several different lessons in Algebra 1.
- LA-Present-Demo - Through her blog posts, she uses photos of completed activities or note pages to show how the materials should be used and completed.
- LA-Present-Explain - Along with the photos of the completed activities, she writes how she implements the activity into the lesson, the students thinking throughout the activity, and then her thoughts about how to improve it for the following year based on how the lesson went.
- LA-Explore - exploring/investigating mathematical ideas
2. How is the mathematics represented?
The math in this blog is presented in the form of entries by Sarah Carter about the lessons used in her math classes where she teaches. She uses many different graphic organizers, foldables, and interactive notebook pieces. She uploads all of her materials to a dropbox on her website for her followers to access and use for their own classrooms. The technology of posting her materials and thoughts on her blog allows for other teachers to communicate with her and access them for their own use.
3. What role does technology play?
Sarah Carter presents her materials and their uses in her classroom for her followers to read, evaluate, and decide whether or not they would like to use them in their own classrooms. She creates a lot of her own materials by way of interactive notebook materials, graphic organizers, foldables, and activities for various topics in Algebra 1. The ability to download some of the materials from her website can be affected depending on the interface that you are using. Many of her materials are written using Microsoft Word which is mostly compatible with Mac and would be completely compatible with a PC running Microsoft Office.
Affordances of Technology for Supporting Learning
- Representing Ideas & Thinking - Sarah Carter uses her blog to show how she has helped her students to think about math and how to represent math in her classroom. Many of the materials that she provides on her blog are created by her to represent the ways that she has found her students to understand math and how to organize that thinking into their notes.
- Accessing Information - This blog allows other educators to access all materials from Sarah Carter's lessons as well as her application of them through her blog posts.
- Communicating & Collaborating - Readers of her blog can comment on her posts regarding their thoughts on her materials, how they used the materials, and she also communicates how she uses her own materials and then thoughts for how she would improve her own lessons and materials based on what happened in class.
- Capturing & Creating - Sarah Carter creates her own interactive notebook materials and lessons
4. How does the technology fit or interact with the social context of learning?
The technology of blogging allows teachers to communicate, collaborate, and share ideas and materials with each other. Sarah Carter presents her own personal materials and lesson plans in Algebra 1 among other topics for the use of others. While she presents her own materials and lesson plans in her blog, followers and readers possess the ability to comment on her work, and she provides her own commentary on changes that she would make as well.