Something new

Trying something new terrifies me. But here I am about to embark on something new. My algebra 2 students are going to complete a webquest to learn how to solve systems of equations in 2 variables. They will either do a wonderful job or I will tank and have to spend another 2 weeks teaching the old fashioned way with me dictating and them practing. I will keep you all posted on how it goes.
Here are the 2 webquests I found that I am going to use. They both look pretty simple and straight forward. One is really just teaching the methods the other is actually having the students use them. So I have chosen to use them both together.
1st assignment
2nd assignment

Final Class Reflections

Over all this class has been VERY informative and fun to work in. I have taken away so many useful things that I am using with my students. The kids LOVE the blogging. Everyday they ask are we going to blog today. Most days I say yes. I am trying to get them to be more expresive and to think about what they want to say. I still have a few who are not interested and I even had one student say he would rather keep a paper journal than to post to the blog.

I am also using the Furl a lot. I love that I can save any website and always be able to find it again.

I am looking to the future and using a Webquest to help bring to life some of the math topics we have later in the year.

Thank you Holly for an awesome class. We really had a lot of fun and enjoyed all the exploring.

Final Project Reflections

I chose for my final project to creat a webpage. I thought that this would be a great tool for communicating with my students and parents. I could put up important information such as homework and lessons that students could access from anywhere at anytime. This has proven to not be the best way to get all of that information out there.

I chose to use Weebly to create and publish my site. Weebly is so easy to use for the basics but it did limit what I could do. I could not be creative in my layout and organization of my pages. Weebly allowed for preset pages. The word processor was also limiting. You could not change the font size or style with in a paragraph. Everything had to be the same. You also could not cut and paste from an existing document and hold your formatting. Everything had to be reformatted. I struggled trying to add custom HTML to the pages and ended up giving up on that idea. You could only add pictures and text in preset positions.
Over all it Weebly was easy to get started, I was just disappointed with my final outcome.

In creating a webpage, I also found that my inital desires for the purpose of the page were not easy to implement. Keeping the page updated with current information was not as easy as I thought it would be. The class blog was actually easier to post homeowork assignments and to keep them up to date. So I put a link on the webpage to the class blog for one of my classes.

I think I will explore other possible web publishers and see if any of them offer something better for me for creating my webpage.