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Plattsburgh State University of New York – Progress Report

• Principal Investigator: Margaret Morrow
• Topic of Minigrant: A Capstone course for Secondary Education majors
• Duration of Minigrant: 2 years (Dec 2003 - Dec 2005) Possible Date for Visit by PMET Monitor, given by PI: Spring 2005, when (hopefully) we will be piloting the capstone course. Our spring semester runs from 01/24/05 to 05/14/05. We suggest either February, early March, or mid april for a site visit.

Activities and Progess

Overall goal: develop and pilot a capstone coursefor secondary education mathematics majors.

1. Timeline: We plan to submit the course at the end of August 2004, and to pilot the course in Spring 2005.
2. Course planning: The team has identified a number of content themes, and we are currently having in-depth discussions fleshing out the details on these themes. All the team members have had the opportunity to read the MET document, and our choices are being influenced by that document, by NYS standards, NCTM standards and by recent NYS regents examinations. (Our content themes are: Geometry, Trigonometry, Algebra and number theory, Discrete Mathematics, Probability and Statistics, and Functions.) (We have so far had three extended meetings). Team discussions have been rich and informative; Diane Coupal (our K-12 expert) has provided us with considerable insight into what our students will need when they arrive in the schools, while Drs Kenoyer and Morrow have been able to provide the perspective of the areas in which our students are likely to have weaknesses. We hope to expand our working team by one more member (see separate message), starting next week. At our first expanded team meeting we plan to assign individual team members tasks to begin developing assignments and resources for topics in the proposed course.
3. Ordering software and calculators: We persuaded Texas instruments to send us a projection screen for use with calculators. Considering that the budget granted under the grant was less than our original request, we wrote an application for an in-house technology grant for the upgrade of Geometers sketchpad, and also to provide a site license for Fathom (in our original PMET grant application we requested funding for a 50 user pack). While the final decision on these in-house grants will not be made for another month, we have been told that our applicationis looking good. For this reason we are simply holding off on orderingthe software at this stage. We have demonstration versions of fathomthat we are using as we develop the course. Since our department was involved in two extremely time-consuming faculty searches, we have postponed to the Fall semester the graphing calculator workshop that Diane Coupal will present to our faculty. We have held off on the purchase of calculators considering that TI is bringing out a new version (TI 84 plus).