Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

As I was perusing Classroom 2.0 this morning while enjoying my chai tea and postponing the real work of the day,  I came across a request on the Main Page by an Australian educator named Stacey Kelly. First if you haven’t joined this great online community of educators, you’re really missing out. They have a great webmeet for ‘newbies’ like me in Elluminate at 9am on Saturday mornings (Pacific time).  The last one was on tagging and using the social bookmarking website, Diigo,  in classrooms. Second if you’re in Canada or the US and can help Stacey out, I’m sure she’d appreciate hearing from you.

Now to math: I attended a session by our Smart/Notebook instructional development rep last week and she mentioned a website of interactive math games and activities called the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives.  Students can work online or schools can purchase site licenses or CD’s to use on individual computers. You can play in 3 languages: English, French, or Spanish.

I found some of the 9-12 problems to be pretty challenging and a little obscure for my students. It would have been nice if they’d loaded sample solutions to help the students get started. As you can see in the 21 game below, there can be a lot of trial and error involved if the students receive no guidance in how to develop a solution strategy.

This next game on adding equivalent fractions, again with some intervention from the teacher, can be a great way to illustrate to older students why the fractions must have the same denominators in order to be able to collect the pieces. Alternatively, you can let the kids loose and ask them to play until they come up with the reason. Get them to write their reasons on a hidden screen, and then review with the class when they’ve all had a chance to experiment either individually or in pairs. With an interactive whiteboard it’s easy to annotate and add the final explanation, screen capture, and put into a notebook file that students can look up if they want to review.

Hmmmm . . . I just had a thought. There are many students who make it into algebra and can collect like terms perfectly well, but cannot conceptualize why they have to have common denominators to add fractions. I suspect they got mixed up right at the beginning and resorted to trying to memorize steps that made no sense. Once the memorization failed, they gave up. When I make older kids learn this task in grade 10 or 11, they can systemize and reproduce the steps more capably, but often still have no concept of why this has to be done. I think if I combine this game and the idea of like terms (which they do understand), I can finally help them crack some of the confusion about fractions.

Finally if you’d like me to share my notes from the Classroom 2.0 webinar on tagging/Diigo or from the pro-d I attended on suggested strategies, tactics, and skills for using a Smartboard & Notebook software more effectively, leave me a comment and I’ll pass them along.