Tech Task #8

Podcasts

I have tried listening to a few different educational podcasts and have not had much luck finding any good ones that interest me. The problem I think is that they often spend too much time introducing the teachers/ educational professionals who are going to be on the podcast. Then when they finally bring them on to speak, the guest themselves spend more time talking about who they are. They only end up talking about their ideas for a few minutes. To me it just seems like too long to listen to only get a few minutes of actual ideas and strategies that you could use in the classroom. Perhaps I just had bad luck with the educational podcasts that I tried but for me I didn't find listening to these podcasts the most worthwhile professional development. I think I will stick to educational blogs, twitter, pinterest, teachers pay teachers, ect. for my personal time spent on professional development.

I do however have a podcast that I listen to on a weekly basis. It is just a personal interest of mine but I like the possibilities of  being able to incorporate it into a math classroom.  The podcast is called TSN hockey analytics. They have a weekly 45 minute podcast where host Andy McNamara usually has a few different guest speakers and they talk everything new in the hockey analytics world. Hockey analytics is a new fad in the sport where people are creating these new advanced statistics to determine all sorts of things about the game. Who the best players are, what the best strategies are, which teams will win, etc. The traditional hockey experts who have been around the game forever are being replaced with mathematicians/ statisticians. If  anyone has ever seen the movie Moneyball, it is exactly like that just with hockey instead of baseball. I think it could be a great way to get students excited about math. I really like the inquiry based learning idea that has been shared with us by guest speakers. When I first thought about inquiry based learning I thought it would be really good for science and could see it working not bad with history. I didn't think of math for inquiry based learning really at all. But when you think about it, the main knock students have with math is they say "when are we ever gonna use this". Inquiry based learning would be exactly that, seeing a bunch of different ways that you can use math in real life. I think math would be perfect for a 20time project. One day a week they are able to get away from a traditional math class and do something that interests themselves. If there were hockey fans in the class I would encourage them to look into hockey analytics. If there were students who liked other sports, they could look into analytics into their sports. There would be lots of different options for the non-sports fans as well. I think it would be a great way to get students interested in math and learning in new ways.