Week 6

After all the work in week 6, I feel like some of this work is butting into my work on my TI-Nspire. I don't mean to complain, but it does seem like sometimes there is just too much work to also work on the technology we were assigned. A lot of times I don't have much time to devote 3 hours of stuff and get my other homework done for the week. So sometimes I push it to the weekend. I guess I should try to organize my time better. I have never been a very good organizer so this is troubling to me. Either way I still feel that this week, the work load was a lot more than usual. Two to three hours on one thing, a few readings and working on our technology. Some students have to prepare to teach on Tuesday. I can't imagine how they are. It's probably hard enough for them to meet up considering one of them participates in a sport. Sometimes it seems that I just cannot keep up with all the work in all my classes. I think the readings are important each week, along with the blog reflections and things, but with multiple assignments tagged onto this it just seems near impossible to get it all straightened out in a timely fashion where it doesn't seem like I am cramming everything onto Sunday. I do understand that this class is more of an experiment and I give it great leniency, but you (Dr. Shafer) give us great leniency. The main point of this blog is for you to determine what is good for the class in the future and what is not. I think that the Illuminations assignment was kind of a waste of time. It didn't really help me with picking out articles. One thing I do not understand is how this pertains to a technology course. We are just looking online and working with lessons that mostly involve a lack of technology, so it seems pretty pointless to incorporate a DP3 artifact on a rubric in a technology class about something that isn't really about technology. Also working with my TI-Nspire, I have noticed that there are endless possibilities when it comes to findign lessons and activities that will work for this. The one thing I don't like is how different the CAS version of the calculator is than the one i purchased. The CAS is a lot better and can do so much more. I do know now that the calculators we will be getting for the class are the ones that are identical to mine. In order to do many of these activities, we must upload programs onto these calculators. I have learned much about this technological device, but feel I could learn so much more without hours and hours of other assignments for this class. I have yet to post about the articles that I have found on the Nspire for my topic area (Triangular Trigonometry) because some of them I have misplaced on my computer. Once I find them again, they will be posted onto my ilocker and onto my google docs. I think this class is really progressing well, and I look forward to the next speaker.