Small Changes; BIG RETURNS

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Popeye was “strong to the finich” because he ate his spinach. Math is kind of like the spinach of school subjects -- most students do it because it’s good for them, not because it’s inherently enjoyable or meaningful. Out of school long enough to understand the challenges that lie ahead, parents know how many doors close when students are not successful in academic math classes. They want their kids to tough it out. However, teens are often more familiar with the frustration that results from poor understanding, disconnection from the content, and lack of skills mastery. Many just want to get out’.

Given many students' difficulty learning math and its importance in securing their futures, math class should be a natural place for trying new strategies, tools, and ideas to enhance learning. But math teachers are often the last in schools to try 21st century tools and strategies. Although math should be about problem-solving and communication, it can devolve into repetition and memorization of skills or solving of story problems that seem to students to have little to do with the real world. For them, what's learned in math class, stays in math class.

Math teachers all agree that more we get students doing math, the more math they'll learn. However, what secondary math teachers often don't realize is that many of these new technologies will give them ways to actually accomplish that -- by getting students talking about and doing more math. The value of Web 2.0 tools lies in their ability to help math teachers:

• ensure old skills gaps are filled and new skills are well understood and well learned,
• build math reading comprehension skills so that students are not baffled by the way language is used in math questions,
• engage students in communication and collaborative problem-solving so they have to ‘speak’ math,
• encourage higher order thinking skills by making intriguing connections between math and the world outside the math classroom,
• provide students practice using tools they will need for study and work after high school, and
• connect with other math teachers who are also trying these new approaches.

If we secondary math teachers can turn the part of the day students spend in our classes into a part of the day students look forward to, the time, effort, and deep thought that will be required of us to find, learn, and create compelling uses of Web 2.0 tools and resources will reward us with gold.

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.