Thoughs on the blogging Journey

Taking this class gave me my first experience with running a personal blog. I used to browse others’ blogs for lesson plans and recipes but never shared my feedback, being much more a borrower than a contributor. It took few sessions before I enjoyed the experience of logging in to share my thoughts with classmates, since I originally considered blogging to be just a digital form of traditional writing assessment. After reading other classmates’ posts, I realized that our blogs were much more than assignments.

I noticed that many posts in our class were immediate impressions to ideas mentioned in textbooks or other posts. Some are about experiences that resonate with research; others relate reading material to teaching experiences. Even though posts are published in an asynchronous manner, many suggest ideas that trend for a while. I view blogging in our course as a mixture of group discussion and group assessment. First, I am always aware that I have a larger audience when blogging compared to writing essays that are read by the marker’s eyes only. I feel very comfortable in this new sort of learning culture formed by this regular blogging and weekly meetings. Secondly, with knowing that the professor is a reader instead of a dominant blogger, I feel more comfortable expressing my ideas when compared to classroom discussions. My explanation would be that blogging offers more flexibility in space and time and helps thinking be translated into text more freely. Finally, I believe it helps to improve self-regulation. According to Ormrad, "Self-regulated" describes a process of taking control of and evaluating one's own learning and behaviours. I see opportunities to practice learning efforts that will give rise to academic success.

I really enjoyed the readings regarding problem posing. These readings opened a window for me and significantly impacted my understanding of my research questions.  My research will try to show that Problem-based-learning (PBL) allows students to actively explore various approaches to questions with more than one solution in real-world contexts, hence stimulating and constructing their own understanding of subject matter. In light of the reading, I realized that educational robotics has the potential to provide less time-consuming feedback to students’ questions so students need not wait their turn to receive feedback from teachers. Although I am still working on new models, I believe student posing questions will play a large role in their design.

Another greatest learning has occurred due to the incredible international setting of the classroom. Imagine math educators from west to east, from elementary level to university level, meeting weekly of refreshed minds? It is indeed a valuable eye-opening journey for any educator/researcher.  Thank you all for the excitements, intriguing questions, encouragement to the journey.

 

Well, my questions remain,

1. How do students view educational robots as a mathematics teaching agent? 

 

2. In which ways do elementary students’ dispositions towards mathematics carry over to their further studies?

3. In which ways do students pose math problems outside of school?