SAMR & Bloom's Digital in my Math classroom

I really love Duckworth's (2015) characterisation of the SAMR model. As a science teacher, the imagery of delving deeper to discover the what's hidden in the ocean is particularly appealing.

In my own classroom, I've certainly been using technology to substitute and augment learning tasks since I started teaching. This year, however, I have focused on modifying learning tasks with technology, and have even managed to redefine some tasks. In general, I would say that my classroom practice sits between modification and redefinition on the SAMR scale, and between analysing and evaluating on Bloom's Digital Taxonomy.

I endeavor to teach mathematics with an inquiry approach, encouraging my students to construct their own mathematical understandings (Goos et al., 2017). This pedagogical approach means that technology integration tends to be on the transformative end of the scale due to the kind of critical thinking that inquiry learning encourages. It is important to think of technology integration as a way to support our pedagogical approach, rather than the other way around (Marcovitz & Janiszewski, 2015).

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In my lesson example from the Week 2 blog, I distributed digital notes that included inquiry prompts to guide and support students' use of dynamic graphing software, Desmos, to investigate transformations of trigonometric functions. The use of Desmos is a task modification that fits into the Analysing and Evaluating steps in Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. The technology is used to investigate, examine and assess the trig transformations in a way that is a significant redesign on how this was previously done on paper. The gamified formative assessment (Cassie, 2016; Roblyer & Doering, 2014) using Kahoot! (Samhunter, 2017) is an augmentation of a pen and paper quiz as it provides students with immediate feedback, rather having to wait until it is marked by the teacher. My next focus for technology integration in my classroom is to see how I can use it to encourage creative thinking and production in math.

#SAMR #BloomsDigitalTaxonomy #teachingmath #Desmos #DynamicGraphingSoftware