Blog Entry #2

In this entry, you will summarize your curricular integration project plans for the class, identify what you’ll need to complete the project, identify what you hope to learn by doing the project, and provide a discussion of how you can connect what you learn and do on the class project to your own teaching practices. An important theme of this blog entry should be how your project connects to your classroom and teaching practices. For my curricular integration project I plan on creating a WebQuest for a probability unit. This will be geared towards my Integrated II math class (10th grade level math). I have issues with how the topic is presented in the school text and would like to create more supplemental materials to support student learning. This was a topic they struggled with this past year. Also, I will have a class of students with special needs and learning disabilities next year and think a WebQuest project would be a good way to support their learning as it can be easily modified and they tend to be more comfortable with information presented using technology than our typical text. In order to complete the project I will need to research websites that contain usable data. I will also need to introduce how to use Google Docs to create a survey, as I would like to students to work on gathering their own data to support their learning. By gathering and analyzing their own data, I hope students will be more invested in the project and in their own learning. By doing this project I hope to experience an alternate way to engage my students. They are so willing to do anything with technology and, if this WebQuest goes well, I hope to create a library of relative WebQuests for applicable units. I focus on experiential learning and discovery in class and this will be a great alternative to the low-tech options I currently use. I am excited to try this project and think it will be something I can use often in class. I would also like to modify the idea of a WebQuest to a non-public Google Doc that takes my students through a concept. Our text involves a LOT of reading, there are not examples of how to do problems, but discussion questions that encourages students to think through the process and learn the method on their own. While I love this method for a majority of my students, the students with special needs really struggle with this setup. I would like to provide an alternate way for them to gather the material without just giving it to them and think I could incorporate what I learn in this project to do that. I hope to compile several unit lessons throughout the years.