Google Forms

For my Professional Development Plan I explored Google Forms to see how it can be incorporated in my future classroom.

Google Forms is a great resource for it allows you to make an online quiz and share it with all of your students. They then can take the quiz, and the results will be sent straight to th teacher. For some quiz formats the students can be given the answers to see how well they did right after they complete the assessment.

To explore Google Forms, I created my own assessment. I chose to create my assessment on the algebraic standards of factoring polynomials to better relate to my future classroom. Creating the form was very easy, and did not take a lot of outside research (tutorials, Google info) to figure out how it works.

Cyberbullying

CNN NEWS ON CYBERBULLYING:
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/06/24/am.intv.walsh.cnn

For my Professional Development Plan I researched Cyberbullying to understand why it is a problem, in and outside of a classroom.


To better understand cyberbullying, I looked at STOPcyberbullying.org to see exactly what it was and why it is such a problem. The facts shocked me. The website has seperate pages for differen
t age groups, as young as 7 years old! Just the thought that seven year olds were being bullied or actually bullying themselves made me realize how much technology and the Internet has changed.

What exactly is cyberbullying?
Cyberbullying is when a child intentionally threatens, harrasses, or humiliates another child via technology such as the Internet and phones. It is done through direct attacks through messaging or through proxys. Many schools however, cannot directly intervene. Many times the child just keeps the fact that they are being bullied to themself.

How to handle cyberbullying
STOPcyberbullying.org and Cyerbullyinginfo both explain how to handle different instances of cyberbullying based on the persona of the bully. The following are different scenarios of cyberbullying.

The 'do gooder' cyberbully doesn't realize that they are the bully. To them, they are just righting a wrong that happened to them or one of their friends. In this situation, it is important to explain to the bully how their actions are wrong. But directly telling them may not be the best answer. Reporting them to an anonymous site or informing for parties of parents will give the bully a support system when dealing with their bullying problem.

Some cyberbullies bully out of revenge and malice. Their motives are intentional, and they know it. They typically were the victims previously but have found cyberbullying as a solution. These cases should be handled by a higher authority (parents, school officials, and in some instances police) because they are typically targeted one on one and use a higher technology to accomplish their bullying.

Some children are inadvertantly a cyberbully. Typically this is only once or twice action in which they are hurt and don't think before sending a message. These are the easiest cyberbullies to deal with, for typically they realize what they have done and will make amends themselves. Otherwise, just talk to the bully and explain that their actions were wrong.

Data Driven Decision Making

This is a lab workout which analyzed a mathematic misconception.

First, this question was asked:

When you multiply two numbers together, the answer is always bigger than both the original numbers
(1) True(2) False(3) I don't know

The answer, is (2) False. When you a number by any number less than one, the rseult will be less than both of the original numbers.

To see how well the class did, I explored Excel and used the Pivot Table feature to analyze the answer data. The results show that 81 said true, 321 said false, and 10 were unsure. 91 people had the misconception that multiplication always produces larger results. Based on these results, this concept needs to be evaluated further during multiplication lessons.