Dan,
For actively instructing Maths I’m at as much of a loss as you. As you mentioned, blogs / wikis etc obviously have their uses, but haven’t fundamentally changed the way I deliver Maths (and with the continual battle I have to get anything unblocked and working in school, even these tend to fall on their face after a while).

Maybe I can suggest using google forms for data collection?
http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/02/10/using-google-forms-in-the-classroom/ Not sure if statistics is taught with Math in the US?

So, little help I’m afraid. But on a side note I think you will enjoy an ex-colleague’s new blog: http://mrhillmaths.edublogs.org/

Cheers,
Dan

Strange to see someone referring to my blog in the last comment when I am about to make a comment myself.

I am a primary school teacher in England so I have the pleasure of teaching every subject including maths – we have used Twitter in a maths lesson on probability http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/2008/03/07/plan-tweet-teach-tweet-learn-smile/

it was fun and provided a human quality to the data.

you’ve found Goldfish.

I doubt you have much need for anything else in the math classroom.

Time was, I’d recommend Darren Kuropatwa as the go-to guy for math instruction using read-write technology but I pay my taxes more often than he blogs.

Ouch. But, of course, you’re right. ;-)

For what it’s worth, I’m not so sure there’s such a thing as a discipline (math) specific “set of tools” that you can just plug and play. With that said here are some of the things I do (when I’m not on parental leave):

The Class Blog …

– aggregates student generated content which includes daily student summaries of what they are learning (I know, I know; you didn’t want to hear this one)

– aggregates daily class notes (archived on slideshare with worked examples by teacher and students (mostly students) including all errors and corrections.

– aggregates youtube video archive of relevant instructional or review material (look down the right hand sidebar about halfway down this page).

– aggregates del.icio.us bookmarks vetted and contributed by students; each student contributes 1 BM/Unit of study (keep looking down the sidebar of that page)

– aggregates digital photo assignments, group work with solutions and student commentary, and links to other class archives of content (wiki solution manuals, summative digital projects, and anything else we happen to create over our time learning together.

The blog is the hub. There’s a lot more going on than blogging their class notes.

I hope some of these ideas/links are helpful to you. I look forward to one day chatting with you f2f over a cup of coffee … or better yet, a beer.

Cheers,
Darren

As I lurk here to see where this discussion unfolds, I wonder about a future podcast with Dan and Darren, not to debate, because I’m not seeing a controversy, but as two outstanding, passionate educators talking about how Math, as likely the most elusive discipline as it relates to the interweb, is supported by the interweb. That’s a really lousy way of saying, let’s talk.

Dan I hear you on this. I had my annual “goals” meeting with my principal last week. He spent the entire hour telling me that he saw me moving into a position of “technology leadership” in the building. He wants to send me to an edutech conference this month. I looked through the sessions. Its all wiki’s blogs, and moodle, etc. Frankly I’m not interested and don’t see these improving my ability to teach math.

I use a setup similar to yours (although I use a tablet PC + projector combo). I’m also a strong proponent of direct instruction and I only use technology when its benefit clearly outweighs the flash. I traded my clickers to another teacher for a set of small whiteboards & dry erase markers. Much more efficient in my view.

I don’t know how to tell the principal that I’m not the web 2.0 messiah he thinks I am.

This makes me chuckle like the time a year or two ago when somehow you’d volunteered to lead a staff development session on Moodle….!

I spent my guest blogging week at Dangerously Irrelevant on this topic, and there was at least a few promising things in the comments, especially in this post.

We’re luckier than most: my grade 10 and grade 11 classes just got tablet PCs with the entire high school having them next year. So….

I’ve got students creating screencast movies using OneNote and Cam Studio. Every unit, each student makes one or two “tutorials” to share with their classmates. The next step is to create a linked video library on our school-based wiki (it’s all internal unfortunately so no outside access) that students can use to prepare for tests and revise for final exams…

Last year, I did a similar thing (on a much smaller scale, obviously) with my grade 9s and 1 tablet. Group them in pairs, give them an appropriately difficult word problem, have them solve it, write a ‘script’, make a screencast. I then let the students access those movies via a couple of laptops during the unit test as ‘notes’.

Guessing that emphasis on math standards cycles back through Feltron and the frustration of Geometry results?

We’re all needing to focus so much on our specific standards, but the tech standards aren’t happening. At least one English teacher at my school is just having students hand in handwritten copies of essays, because she can’t justify the time it takes to type, never mind format, magazine-style articles. No answers here, just the observations and questioning how much we’re really preparing students for life beyond our walls.

Use Jing to introduce the technology and the students can take it from there. As far as using technology to improve the teaching of mathematics, there’s got to more effective ways. I look forward to finding them and developing some myself.

Comment #18 would be the topic and focus of the impending Skype conversation.

@Sarah Thanks for the kind words.

@Dan What do you mean by the (web 2.0) “collaborative tool that meets math standards”? I suppose I could rattle off a list of web based math tools but others have preceded me at that. Could I rattle off a few more? Maybe, but just go digging in my del.icio.us bucket and poke around my stuff labeled “tools” or “math” (probably both) and you can add them to your own bucket as well.

In my view, web 2.0 is soylent green, not a bunch of tools. (Nod to Cole Camplese for the analogy.)

Dan, you comment that my techniques can only be used for assessment. Is assessment somehow distinct and separate from teaching and learning? How do you draw fine lines between those things? Ideally assessments sould entail learning as well. No?

@Dean Might be a fun podcast to do. ;-)

Dan,

While I am impressed that you quoted me, I was using you more as an example of web 2.0 in math staff development (which is why your media posts are perfect examples).

For your students, I think Math is a subject that has two things preventing it from fully being a part of the web 2.0 education movement.

First: Its not easy to do math with just a keyboard. Give every student a tablet PC and the ability to annotate on top of an image or within a workspace and then we can talk about activities.

Secondly: Its one of the subjects where communication with outside sources really doesnt add much enrichment to the learning. Yes you can find cool examples, but once that example is solved, its done. Theres no thread of conversation at the level that most teachers do math. (I’m not sure if this applies entirely to you – but I will bet that many teachers do not use a math problem to start a week long conversation where at the end several people are right)

One of the topics that I would love to see enter into HS math is some of the probability and statistics that come from computer science – especially machine learning. If I give you a data set and “code” a series of the information (provide a category based upon the data). You then try and learn a rule that will code future pieces of data. hmm.. Maybe I’ll write this up and share it.

But I think that with math especially the immediate feedback is more important than the distant expert.

Does anyone remember the Math Forum? When I was in college I was one of the Math Doctors – Students would email the service with questions and the collection of Math Doctors would be able to pick and choose the questions to answer.

There is great education research that shows students learn complex thinking skills and challenging topics best by practice and teaching the topics to others. What about creating a homework help site? Students asking questions are not allowed to post the exact problem from the homework – must change the numbers around, and helpers are not allowed to give the solution but only next steps in the process.

The rules of interaction here will define this a particularly suited for math.

@Dan: I’m not convinced. How does this meet more of an ELA standard than it does a mathematics standard? Even for struggling learners how can this be more of an ELA assessment than a mathematics assessment?

As for the “cost” vis a vis access to computers and the internet at home, I teach in an urban inner city school. Almost all kids have computers at home but there are always those that don’t. So, as a public school, it is our responsibility to provide equal opportunity at school for all students to achieve and get the same quality of education. I’ve often had students use my classroom computer to do their assignments and they use the school computers in the library or computer labs. It’s doable. Very doable.

From what I’ve seen happening in my school, and what I’ve been doing with my students for several years now, the concerns you raise here haven’t materialized.

Oh, BTW, the only way I found this was searching my name, if you’ll link my name to my blog, I’ll be faster in responding as I often don’t take the time to search my name (about once a month) to respond to edublogospherians!!! ;-)

Thanks for a great blog!