Quadratics Unit Padlet

Click here for Padlet

Use in the Classroom
Typically, this unit requires a lot of note taking and practice.  It spans several days and the students spend an exorbitant amount of time listening to me rather than focusing on the task at hand.  With this padlet, I could essentially "set my students free" in a Web-Quest style lesson.  Giving the students a goal with practice problems, the students could peruse the padlet in pairs or groups to find solutions to the questions given.  This frees me up to be able to provide extra support to those who need it.

Learning Objectives

Several learning objectives are achieved in this padlet.

-I can analyze the graph of a quadratic and identify it's parts.
-I can create a graph of a quadratic based on the parts of a parabola.
-I can solve a quadratic equation.
-I can evaluate the different methods for solving and appropriately select the method best suited for the problem.

Copyright

Since the goal of this padlet is mainly to introduce the topics of quadratics to the students, talking about copyright will be difficult.  My main plan would be pointing out the copyright information listed on each link in the padlet, showing the students that the information was cited and came from sources that allowed its use.  By the end of the unit, I could have students create their own padlet where they get to pick one of the three methods to solve.  They would be required to have at least 5 sources and the sources must contain 3 of the 5 possible CC licensing categories.  Sources must be cited appropriately.  This concept could be applied to beyond just this unit.  Students could be required to create a presentation, WebQuest, or padlet on any topic.

Principles of Multimedia Instruction

At first glance, a padlet may seem like it flies in the face of the extraneous processing principles.  There is a ton of information presented at once in many different formats.  Giving the students a worksheet or packet that outlines exactly what their goals are can keep them focused and on track through the padlet.  This padlet is segmented and allows students to go through each topic at their own pace which is nice.  It also has spatial contiguity with the descriptions near the topics.  I also tried to focus on the essential material and not get bogged down with the minor details which falls in line with signalling.  My first three posts in the padlet are mainly for pre-training to give the learners a heads up on the topics, definitions, and key-concepts.  There is an issue with so much of this being printed words with other forms of media.  This may be overwhelming to the visual center for some learners.  Hopefully utilizing pairs or groups while working on this could get the students collaborating and talking to each other which aids in the mental processing of information.

Reflection

Firstly, my thinking has changed on a service like padlet.  It is quite a bit of work to compile all of the resources but I feel this is truly something I could use in my classroom.  Giving the students a link to something like this is useful because it extends outside of the classroom.  It is well organized and titled with each topic so if a student is struggling at home on an assignment, they can always go back.  Also, giving them something like this in the classroom and requiring them to explore it to answer the exact same questions I would expect them to answer in a more traditional unit layout means the students have the same expectations yet can make deeper connections with the material due to the fact that they are going at their own pace, able to process with another student or students, and I am able to provide more one-on-one support for those who need it.

When I first started teaching, I was told by an older teacher to live by the motto "Beg, borrow, and steal."  This week has shown me that this is not the best motto at all.  It takes an extra few minutes to ensure the material I find is available for me to use in the classroom but it could definitely save me lots of trouble later.

When thinking about the topics learned last week and what I created this week, I notice that there are definitely some things that are really in-line with the multimedia principles and there are others that are not.  I outlined a few of the positives above that really fell in line with the learning from last week like segmenting, spatial contiguity, signalling, and pre-training.  Some of the principles that were outlined last week that may find some tension in this activity could be temporal contiguity, redundancy, and voice.  I tried my best to avoid any extraneous material but the last pad in the padlet does go into some detail about how the quadratic formula was derived.  This is definitely unnecessary information and could distract my learners from the intended goal.  I did leave it in as the article before it was very useful to support the previous pad's video.

Despite how time-consuming creating a pad can be, I enjoyed it.  It gave me a new resource that I could use for this style of lesson or have my students create as they learn through a unit.  Also, searching through topics to fit the CC categories was nice as I feel like I found more meaningful materials when I restricted out the copyrighted and commercial material.  The options I had to pick from were narrowed but they were also more meaningful.