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My Technology Use: February 19, 2018: Conversion Examples

This week, I didn't try anything fancy in my classroom with technology, but instead had a spur of the moment opportunity to utilize technology to further my students' understanding.  We are working on converting units of measure.  It is my first year teaching fourth grade math, and when asking a coworker (who taught math previously in fourth grade) what background knowledge students usually come with as far as measurement goes, she said in the past they had a basic idea of what each unit of measure was.  This year, of course, was not the case at all.  My students picked up on feet and inches, but kilograms, grams, meters, millimeters, etc. were all very foreign words to them.  I quickly realized that there was no discussion that was going to help them understand, so I turned to technology for help.
We went through each unit of measure individually and because it was spur of the moment, I only thought to Google each unit of measure and show real-life examples of things each unit would be used to measure.  We then discussed, "What unit would you use to measure a desk?", etc.  My students loved being able to see each unit of measure in a way that they could connect to.  Technology really saved that lesson from completely going downhill with no recovery.  If I would have thought ahead of time that my students would need more examples, I would have looked for an online tool that was more interactive with units of measure, but having the Google examples worked well for this lesson.  Has anyone else ran into a similar situation and fallen back on technology to help?  Also, does anyone have any good interactive conversion tools they use for fourth grade (or elementary) math? 

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 20, 2018 at 6:00 PM

    I have turned to Google so many times to save a lesson! Sometimes an image or article that I can quickly pull up to further explain the topic of discussion is just what the students need in order to fully understand. Google has changed my life for the better! As for math, I actually don't know of any interactive tools off the top of my head, but I will ask around for you and see what our 4th grade teacher did!

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