Sources

I learned a lot from my student teaching, but one very important lesson I learned was that it is just as important to be knowledgeable as it is to be resourceful. You definitely need to know your content area, but nobody knows everything. As I was planning lessons, I found out that there are a lot of trivialities and minor details that I couldn't remember from my undergraduate program. Luckily we have the old www to fall back on.
The best site that I have found for pure math questions has to be Wolfram MathWorld. This site has everything you need to know and much more. Just type in a search query and a list of results pops up. You should be able to find out just about anything that you need.
Something else I found to be a real time saver was to have someone write my lesson plans for me. With Purplemath you can do exactly that. They have a catalog of lesson plans for Pre-Algebra, Algebra 1 and Algebra 2. I wouldn't recommend relying on this regularly since you'll probably have to tweek the lessons a little to fit them into your class but it can come in handy every now and then.
Another thing I found myself spending a lot of time doing was writing worksheets. Luckily there are plenty of good worksheet generators online. One pretty good one I found was EraserDog. This is a pay-optional site but you can get everything you need for free.
There are plenty of other sites that I frequented during my student teaching, but I thought this was a nice blend of things that are useful to new teachers.

IEP

Technology and Math go together like peanut butter and jelly. However, there is a very real danger that you can overuse technology in mathematics to the point that students will understand the programs they are using but not the concepts. Since that is the case, math teachers are constantly striving to find the appropriate level of technology in the classroom. In my modest experience, I found that technology is best suited to reinforce most concepts in Algebra but can be used quite effectively to discover concepts in Geometry.

I think the students really enjoyed using Geometer's Sketchpad. We did several lessons with this program and I found them to be quite insightful for a large majority of the Geometry class. I had used this program in my college geometry class, however, the univeristy uses a very outdated version of the program so I had to do quite a bit of work to get myself to a place where I felt comfortable teaching it to students. I did find it very rewarding and I've picked two of my favorite lessons to show you here: Finding Euler's Line and Critical Thinking Word Problems.

In Algebra, we used the TI - 84 Graphing Calculator. I had never really used this model of TI but I have used other models pretty extensively. I found that my experience with the other models made learning the 84 pretty intuitive. And since most high school and college students rely heavily on these, I thought I should include two lessons with these: Matrices and Graphing Parabolas.

We also used the Green Globs program a number of times. I had never used this program before but I found that it was great at reinforcing ideas. This program is an extensive graphing program that includes games and puzzles. This is the type of program that a teacher could lose their students in if they used it too often. We stayed away from the games but used the graphing programs in Graphing Parabolas and Circles and Graphing Ellipses and Hyperbolas.

iMovie

I created a math specific iMovie as part of an assignment, but I ended up having a lot of fun with it. I really got to unleash my inner math nerd. I struggled with the main idea for a long time. The entire premise of the story came from the joke "Why was 6 afraid of 7?" with the punchline "because 7, 8 (ate), 9." But there wasn't much room for character growth. Then I started to think, "What if they made a VH1 Behind the Music about this joke?" My creativity got a huge kick-start when I imagined 7 shouting the infamous and despicable Mike Tyson quote about his upcoming fight with Lennox Lewis. That led to Bruce Buffer making an appearance in the video, which ended up being the funnest part of the project. However, it also made the script longer and made me deviate from my story map. I couldn't keep it under the YouTube limit of 10 minutes, so I had to cut it into two videos. I apologize for that one, but I hope you enjoy.

Educational Philosophy

We've worked pretty hard to refine our educational philosophies in the MAT program. I sometimes feel like mine changes from day to day and chapter to chapter. But I think that's perfectly natural. Some subjects deserve a different kind of treatment than others. Below is the iMovie presentation of my educational philosophy. (I wrote a more elaborate paper on the subject if you would prefer to see it. This is a link to the script.)

Chapters 5 and 6 of "Digital Storytelling in the Classroom"

The essential elements of a good story are often overlooked when it comes to classroom projects. In chapters 5 and 6 of "Digital Storytelling in the Classroom", author Jason Ohler examines exactly what is necessary to make a story worth hearing. He lays out a few simple guidelines to follow to make sure that your students are successful in creating projects that are both meaningful and entertaining.

See my summary of the chapters here.

Teens and technology-- a good match?

A study was done by the Kaiser Family Foundation to examine the use of entertainment media by teenagers. Some of the results were pretty surprising. The article points out that overuse of technology including cell phones, video game consoles, and computers can be extremely damaging.

See what I found here.

See the whole article here.

Anthrotech

There seems to be two main components to any school's success at effectively incorporating technology into the curriculum: funding and follow through. The funding for technology at Thunder Mountain High School has, to this point, been exceptional. There are separate Mac and PC labs as well as laptop carts for the entire school to share.

Click here to see what I found out.

However, the follow through with an efficient plan to apply technology to the curriculum has been somewhat lacking. This was a point of concern to many of the teachers at Thunder Mountain and plans are in place to remedy the situation for next year. With the implementation of a Strand system in the Academies, the school hopes to consistently put the technology to use.