Dana+Shirley

I'm a senior here at Clemson and I'm studying to become a high school math teacher. I want to teach math to persuade and inspire students to truly learn. I want to be an educator that helps form students into competent adults who make a positive difference in society.

This video teaches students not only how to graph a line, but how to draw the line depending on the equality or inequality symbol and on what side of the line to shade given the presence of an inequality symbol.
 * "Shade It"**

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The application I discovered and explored was one concerning the 2006 Christmas Tsunami. The application graphed the epicenter of the earthquake that happened under the ocean, the velocity of the effects on the water, and the height of the waves when the shocked water hit land. This application could hold value in an algebra class studying slope (distance/time) or making graphs (height of water at different places). There are options and other information present in the application that would make a nice unit for a team-taught science and math class co-project. This application offered enough information to come up with many different types of beneficial activities.
 * Google Earth**

Dana's Unit Plan

__Reflection of Sketch-up__ Google Sketch-up holds many different possibilities in a math classroom. I would be interested in using Google Sketch-up in geometry specifically. Students could make structures as they please and use the many cool Sketch-up tools as aides in finding the surface areas or volumes. Words problems could be illustrated when discussing any type of math in Sketch-up; illustrations help most everyone when it comes to word problems! I recently used Google Sketch-up to help a group of my sister's high school classmates to finding application for trigonometry in their Pre-Calculus class. (They got their project back with a grade of 98! Go Sketch-up!)
 * Google Sketch-up

__Sketch-up Sample Problem__ ** I made a house-like structure and included the dimensions. This could be an activity used after exploring how to find volume of prisms and pyramidal objects (3-d objects). I have color-coded part of the picture to create a guided activity for students to make sense of on their own.