In this lesson, students will be creating VoiceThread presentations where they will be teaching SOH-CAH-TOA (right triangle trigonometry) to other students. There will be several major steps to this process:
First of all, students will need to brainstorm ideas of how they want to present their information and how they can tie it to real life. The entire class will work together to brainstorm by finding websites that contain the information they are looking for. They will then save all these links to the social bookmarking site Pinterest, using a SOH-CAH-TOA board created by the teacher. Students can use their peers’ ideas for inspiration, as long as every student saves at least three different websites to the Pinterest board.
Next, students will take pictures of right triangles (or situations that might use right triangles) in their everyday lives and upload them to Flickr. Again, the class will collaborate together on this and will share one social media page. These photos can and should be used in the VoiceThread presentations students will create. Students can use each other’s photos, as long as each student uploads at least three of his or her own unique photos. To encourage adding more photos, students will receive three bonus points if they add seven photos or more.
After brainstorming and compiling a collection of photos, students will begin creating their VoiceThread presentations. Each student will have to create his or her own account. These presentations will be used as videos that would teach other students about right triangle trigonometric ratios. The presentations should include an explanation of sine, cosine, and tangent, one example problem using sine, one using cosine, one using tangent, and one problem that ties SOH-CAH-TOA to real life. Students should create a slideshow presentation using Keynote, Google Slides, or PowerPoint and upload the slides to the VoiceThread. They will then record their voice-overs explaining the material and will also write on the screen using a stylus if necessary. The presentations should be easy enough for someone who is learning SOH-CAH-TOA for the first time to understand.
After students are done with their presentations, they will post a link to their VoiceThreads on a Facebook group created by the teacher. Then, depending on the location of the school and the resources available, the teacher can share these presentations via the Facebook group in two different ways. The first option would be to partner with the math department of one or several local colleges/ universities to have the professors comment on what was done well and what could be improved in each video. The other option would be to share the Facebook page with a Geometry class at another school. The students in that school could watch the videos to learn about right triangle trigonometry and would comment on the videos, stating how they were helpful and what they learned. Students would use this information to create better presentations in the future.