SALEM – Mt. Abram High School math teacher Brian Twitchell has a new tool to use when attempting to get his students engaged in his algebra, pre-calculus and geometry classes, and he has been demonstrating its uses to everyone who will watch his presentation.
The tool is called an electronic white board, and according to Twitchell, it brings a host of new teaching possibilities to his classes. “The potential is just staggering,” he said, describing the approximately $4,000 setup he purchased recently with the help of a Sugarloaf donation.
At first glance, the white board looks like any slide projector, and it hangs on the wall next to the blackboard in Twitchell’s sunny blue room. But the device is much more than that. It not only displays information from Twitchell’s laptop computer screen, it is also touch-sensitive, allowing Twitchell and his students to write math problems on the white board screen.
Using the white board is just “a different way to do what we’ve often done with pencil and paper,” Twitchell said, but the technology allows him to demonstrate concepts to his students that would be almost impossible to illustrate using a traditional chalkboard.
For example, he said, he can demonstrate the properties of triangles to geometry students in a way that makes the math seem concrete, rather than abstract.
Geometry students are taught that, when added, the angles in a triangle always add up to 180 degrees. Twitchell can show this principle to his students, first drawing a triangle on the white board and using the board’s calculator to determine the sum of the three angles. Then, touching the board with his index finger, he can pull one corner of the triangle, changing its shape. New angles then pop up onto the board, and the original calculation adds the new numbers, always totaling 180 degrees.
Twitchell can also make movies out of what is written on the board, complete with sound. The movies can be sent to students who miss classes and are in danger of falling behind in coursework, he said.
The ability to demonstrate abstract concepts, to be able to teach students concrete skills like how to use their complex graphing calculators, and to record lessons for future use, makes the new tool very powerful, Twitchell said. He also thinks the new technology helps engage his students. “They have a lot of fun writing on it and so forth,” he said.
Twitchell and SAD 58’s other math teachers have been using a new teaching system called Math Connections for the past four years.
The program emphasizes skills that students will need in real-world situations, rather than abstract mathematical concepts. Since he has been using Math Connections, Twitchell said, he has seen a sharp rise in his students’ abilities and interest in math. Now, he said, more than half of his students take math classes during all four years of high school, while before he began using the program, only about one-third studied math during their senior year.
Mt. Abram High School received $3,000 in grant money toward the white board from the Sugarloaf Region Charitable Trust earlier this year.
He got the rest of the white board money from selling tests and quizzes to It’s About Time Publishing, the company that publishes his Math Connections textbook.
The company paid him $2,500 for tests he and other Mt. Abram High School teachers had designed.
“They saw what we had developed and they liked them and we said the logical thing to do is to put (the money) into a white board” fund, Twitchell said.
The board in Twitchell’s classroom is the only one Mt. Abram owns so far, but the math teacher said he hopes to purchase one board for every math classroom in the school by the end of this school year.
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