Technology Integration Plan

                Many students struggle to grasp the concepts and applications of rational numbers. Although every school covers these topics in their math curriculum, I find that students are immediately detoured from a math problem that they would be able to solve with integers because the rational numbers are ‘scary.’ This is why I choose to work with a lesson plan teaching students to solve expressions with rational numbers. The lesson should last about 5 days, depending on the comprehension of the students. The teacher may expand the lesson and provide more examples for any given part to ensure student understanding. Unfortunately, the lesson plan is not available online because I received it as a written page from my Inclusion professor last semester. It is imperative that students grasp the concepts of rational numbers because they will not only be found throughout the rest of the students mathematical education, but will also surround them in the real world. Throughout the post, I will be providing explanations for the technologies and strategies listed in my Technology Integration Plan Matrix.

          The lesson begins with the teacher giving a brief lecture and presentation providing students with the instruction and rules on applying operations to expressions with rational coefficients. During the lecture, the teacher will use the whiteboard to show students how to compute the calculations by hand. The students will follow along at their seats and provide their calculations’ in comparison with the teacher’s. Afterwards, they will break into small groups and discuss how they would solve a given set of problems and work through their calculations. The calculator will be provided at the end of the group work for students to evaluate their own calculations. This will provide them the opportunity to visually see that the numbers that they computed by hand are equal to their decimal equivalents.

          During the next topic, students will practice reorganizing problems to figure out what operation will be needed to solve. The teacher will post a different problem on the projector. The students will analyze the problems as a group and decide how they will rewrite the problem. They will write their response on the hand-held white board. The class will all hold up their answers and then have a group discussion answering why they chose to answer the problem this way and how it makes the solution more clear. The teacher may also shed light on how they could come to these decisions and why it will help them.

          The next part of the lesson, students will work together to solve multi-step problems involving rational numbers. Students will be completing a comprehensive worksheet that will allow them to organize rational numbers that are equivalent in different forms, and use them to solve problems. This worksheet will be collected by the teacher to provide a formative assessment of the student’s learning progress. Students will have calculators to help them see the equality of the different forms of the calculations and how they are equal. It will also provide a great opportunity for students to check their work.

          During the following activity, students will analyze real world problems and decide how they will create the equations used to solve them. They will decide how to solve the problems and will work together to discover the best answer. Students will use the graphing software to create graphs of these equations and show their solutions visually. They will then share their answers with the class and discuss what decisions they made and what problems arose while deciding how to answer this question. The teacher will chime in to provide guidance to ensure students find correct solutions.

          The final assessment to this lesson will be a homework assignment that will involve students answering a real world problem. They will work individually to solve a real world problem. While solving this problem, they will utilize all of the skills learned above to create a solution. They will then create a graph of the inequality using a computer graphing software. They will infuse this graph into a word document. In this word document, students will defend their answers and verbally explain how their answer is correct and what it means in relationship to the question asked. This assignment will serve as an assessment of learning for the lesson.

          Although the majority of the technologies in this lesson are not on the cutting edge of the technological advancements, they all provide an enriching purpose in the sake of the lesson. Students will be able to use these technologies in order to accurately visualize and conceptualize the topic at hand.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AimhgsPBiWI6dFZfSFVyRmRubFB0RGgtZkI5X1BLOWc&usp=sharing