Development

Development To begin the unit the foundation knowledge such as vocabulary will be discussed. During a brief lecture students will be asked to create a mind map or mental model (Magliaro & Shambaugh, 2006) of the lecture in Inspiration. The only requirement is that their central node holds the word “statistics.” As the lecture unfolds students will be given time to add nodes to the appropriate area of their own mind map. As the unit proceeds the students will be encouraged to add and adjust vocabulary, rules, examples or anything else that helps them to understand and retain the standards that they are learning. Successful incorporation of efficacious technologies into the mathematics classroom is very often hindered by the teacher’s lack of confidence in learning and implementing new technological mediums into learning activities (Gningue, 2003). Gningue (2003) showed in his research that teachers’ attitudes about the need for students to use a graphing calculator, for example, were generally negative and that teachers do not like to face the uncertainty of introducing new technologies into the learning environment. After receiving short term training on this piece of technology, the teachers in his study expressed a little more appreciation for the benefits of using the graphing calculator (Gningue, 2003). After long term training they showed even more favor toward using both the graphing calculator and Geometer’s Sketchpad. Gningue’s (2003) research reveals that there is a real need for professional development to help alleviate teachers’ fears and feelings of inadequacy concerning the use of new technology. Until the schools see fit to offer assistance through professional development opportunities, teachers can do research then use appropriate technologies to develop lessons where that format improves student learning (Rodriguez, 1988). In this Math II Statistics unit the graphing calculator and Geometer’s Sketchpad can be used to create visuals of sets of data to help students discern the affect outliers have on the mean, median, and mode, if any. Using these two technologies is an improvement over drawing graphs because they save time, make it easy to resize images, improve accuracy, and allow for overlapping of graphs. According to (Merrett & Edwards, 2005) the interactive white board has proven to be an asset to student learning because it immediately provides clear and understandable examples of problems that students are working on. When they are able to approach and manipulate the graphs or actively participate in their own learning students are benefited. The visual, body-kinesthetic, and interpersonal students in the classroom will learn from participating in games on the interactive white board. There are many different ways to use the set up to help them to learn vocabulary for the unit. Since time is limited, we will use one of the many games that can be saved and picked up on another day. Finally, the unit ends with a short summative test and a performance task, the completion of a webquest. Halat (2008) advocates the use of the webquest in the mathematics classroom because it enhances student motivation in class, allows students to enjoy being assessed in a different way, facilitates active student learning, and integrates technology into the classroom in a practical manner. The advantages for teachers are that webquests help teacher to easily ascertain the extent of acquisition of understanding and implementation of knowledge of their students, enhance their creative skills in thinking and writing, think more as they search for topic-related, professional, well-prepared webquests, and to monitor and teach technology skills while teaching content (Halat, 2008). The statistics unit will end with a webquest especially designed to be part of a summative assessment. The link for the webquest for this unit is as follows: [] . Students will have ample opportunities to work together using some of the latest technology to compare their newly learned ideas on how to use statistics tools to make decisions.