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- trakAxPC used to teach Math!
- Thursday, October 29, 2009
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I was delighted to come across this article by Kirstin Hardin this morning - really nice way to start the day. In the article, Kirsten discusses repurposing technology to use in an educational context, in particular using trakAxPC to teach math in school.
“Technology is definitely not too cool for school. Although most technology is not designed with the classroom in mind, technologies can be repurposed as educational tools. As Mishra and Koehler mention, “such repurposing is possible only when the teacher knows the rules of the game and is fluent enough to know which rules to bend, which to break, and which to leave alone” (16). This means that as future teachers, we must familiarize ourselves with technology before we enter the classroom so that we may appropriately use the technology to help teach different subject matters. Three examples of repurposed technology were given: Microblogging, specialized search engines such as visual search engines, and DJ software. My personal favorite repurposing was incorporating DJ software into the classroom. In particular DJ software, for instance trakAxPC, is great for aiding teachers in educating students about math. When you use this software, users are able to download music and then cut, paste and rearrange the music as they like. As students use trakAxPC, teachers can educate the children on fractions, ratios, proportions and even percentages. This hands-on experience makes learning fun, but also suits many different types of learners from visual to auditory and kinesthetic. Also, using this lesson plan introduces students to both mathematics and music. I agree with Mishra and Koehler when they state “teachers need to develop a willingness to play with technologies and an openness to building new experiences for students so that fun, cool tools can be educational” (18).”
Read the rest of the article here >
Kirsten goes to illustrate that by cutting up and sampling music to create a new track, the students can then fill out worksheets dealing with what percentage of songs were sampled, ratio relationships and fractions. It seems a really ingenious way to get students to interact with what could be a relatively staid subject in an extremely fun and practical way.
On our side, it is amazing to see how educators are using trakAxPC and really gratifying to see that it has been useful in a context that we could not have previously imagined. It is also got our minds ticking over on perhaps expanding this idea and making some resources available on the website - will keep you updated.
Thanks Kirsten for the great article!
Catriona
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