Review of 2008: 100 great articles
If you can't find an article about inclusion of educational technology here then you aren't looking very hard.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/30/2008
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/20/2008
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/18/2008
Google Earth Outreach - Tutorial: Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0
I love Google Earth and here is a simple way to create projects about places, create timelines of events, or just have fun remembering a vacation. It's interactive, easy to use, can be educational, what more could you ask for!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/16/2008
For content teachers who need help detecting plagarism. It's not a GOTCHA tool, but a tool for students to use to help them understand how to write without plagarism. It brings to their attention that they haven't paraphrased their writings yet.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/14/2008
Top 10 Best Gadgets of 2008 - Breakthrough Awards - Year's Best Toys - Popular Mechanics
The top ten breakthroughs of 2008 by Popular Mechanics is an incredible list. There are several that have potential impacts on education including the Amazon Kindel and the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen. I am fascinated with the smartpen, because I think it makes taking notes in a lecture setting potentially multidimensional (I can take my notes graphically, but also record what the instructor is saying about those notes).
A resource to inform yourself about modern copyright issues and some other good information about integrating media into instruction.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/08/2008
Which Statistical Test? - ISS Home - Newcastle University
Nice quick list of multivariate statisitical tests and brief descriptions.
I haven't gone through the course, but the design seems well thought out and well versed.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 12/07/2008
Interesting Ways to use Netbooks in the Classroom - Google Docs
Using 'netbooks' in classrooms, but underlying theme is creating centers with students and creating backchannels to have students discuss their learning/lessons.
DigiTales - The Art of Telling Digital Stories
Discussion of components to include in a digital story and how to develop those components.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 11/24/2008
100 Blogs That Will Make You Smarter | Online Universities.com
Not sure all of these are useful with students, but there are great examples of people writing, people commenting, and people creating knowledge together. (The power of web 2.0 that I want to keep encouraging teachers to explore)
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Friday, November 21, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 11/22/2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 11/21/2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 11/16/2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 11/15/2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 11/10/2008
Muscular System | Muscular System Image
Nice interactive lower DOK maps of the human anatomy.
A World of Maths - The Mini | Teachers TV
A video that uses production of the car, Mini, in Britain to reinforce math concepts like, ratio (lots of examples but one car every two minutes, or one in four cars are convertables), shapes used in production. Can be split into small segments.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/30/2008
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/29/2008
Monday, October 27, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/28/2008
The invention of power looms at the time of the - Flash Player Installation
industrial revolution
BBC - History - The Blast Furnace Animation
Industrial revolution information
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/23/2008
Best Children's Picture Books Online - BigUniverse.com
Not all books are free, but a great way to integrate picture books using the LCD projector or Smartboard and a tool to allow students to publish their own picture books
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/21/2008
PBS Teachers | Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Civic Engagement | Access
lesson plans that have students read, write, speak & listen intentionally in their learning.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/16/2008
Texas Instruments Activities Exchange: Browse by Subject
Activities from TI. Well designed and include multiple representations, technology and exploration
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 10/10/2008
Wired is a fantastic source for interesting short readings for science classrooms.
Mathematics Awareness Month - April 2008
A little dated, as I'm sure that the data is now skewed since the primaries are over, but still a good idea for showing calculating winners different ways.
This applet allows the user to represent data about the states using colors. The state with the highest data value is darkest; other states are shaded proportionally. Investigate any of the data provided—or enter data of your own!
Friday, October 3, 2008
Monday, September 8, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/26/2008
Internet Public Library: Online Texts
The Internet Public Library is a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment founded at the University of Michigan School of Information and hosted by Drexel University's College of Information Science & Technology.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/22/2008
Center for Digital Storytelling
The art of personal storytelling. Great how to resource in PDF form on the site
The Elements of Digital Storytelling site provides a:
Taxonomy of digital storytelling.
Analysis of current practices.
Clearinghouse of effects research.
Showcase of innovative story forms.
Forum for discussionDigital Story telling examples including Scott County Kentucky's DS examples
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/12/2008
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.
A service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ) to offer public access to NASA's images, videos and audio collections. Constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.
Web site dedicated to students, teachers, parents, and the general public—to read milestone documents, consider their meaning, discuss them, and decide which are the most significant and why. This initiative creates a number of ways to do that—through classroom activities and competitions, and votes.
Great social studies resource. Lots of PRIMARY SOURCE material, as well as models for how to link to material, write secondary accounts that use primary sources. Great teacher resource!
The Presidential Timeline of the Twentieth Century
Fairly interactive, some primary source pictures, some primary source material. A great example of how a timeline can be used to show the flow of related events or just things that happen when.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/10/2008
Interesting discussion of how to deal with plagarism by teaching students to include links to material, giving credit for the thought and including their own perspective of why it's important. Plagarism is not going away, so how do we teach our students about how to deal with it.
100 Awesome Classroom Videos to Learn New Teaching Techniques | Smart Teaching
A nice balance of videos from instructional point of view and from student product point of view. Worth looking at for the specific content examples as well.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Monday, August 4, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/05/2008
Free Online Course Materials | MIT OpenCourseWare
MIT Open Courseware. A great way for students to access material that may not be presented at their level anywhere else. For that matter a great place for teachers to brush up and expand their thinking. I spent about an hour on the combinatorics course developed by an MIT student for high school math students who are 'bored' by high school math classes. If you are interested, it pushed my understanding pretty quickly!
Another persons effort to organize Web 2.0 applications, so you and I don't have to. I think it's a pretty good list, and worth looking at if you are looking for some new tools. I particularly like earth album http://www.earthalbum.com/
Teaching History With Technology
Welcome to The Center for Teaching History with Technology, a resource created for teachers looking to incorporate technology into their classrooms! THWT aims to help K-12 history and social studies teachers incorporate technology effectively into their courses.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/01/2008
The K-12 Online Conference invites participation from educators around the world interested in innovative ways Web 2.0 tools and technologies can be used to improve learning. This FREE conference is run by volunteers and open to everyone. The 2008 conference theme is “Amplifying Possibilities”. This year’s conference begins with a pre-conference keynote the week of October 13, 2008. The following two weeks, October 20-24 and October 27-31, forty presentations will be posted online to the conference blog (this website) for participants to download and view. Live Events in the form of three “Fireside Chats” and a culminating “When Night Falls” event will be announced. Everyone is encouraged to participate in both live events during the conference as well as asynchronous conversations. More information about podcast channels and conference web feeds is available!
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/28/2008
HowStuffWorks - Learn How Everything Works!
great resource. Nice layout for a how it works feature article. Students can find articles that relate to some interest that they have.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/18/2008
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/tutorial/Cho/design.htm
Research Designs
Quantitative studies of school effects have generally supported the notion that the problems of U.S. education lie outside of the school. Yet such studies neglect the primary venue through which students learn, the classroom. The current study explores the link between classroom practices and student academic performance by applying multilevel modeling to the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress in mathematics. The study finds that the effects of classroom practices, when added to those of other teacher characteristics, are comparable in size to those of student background, suggesting that teachers can contribute as much to student learning as the students themselves.
New AIR Study Compare the Quality of U.S. Math Instruction with Singapore, a Recognized Leader
Information on Singapore Math, simple explanation, concrete bar model approach, very structured.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 06/12/2008
Funding News - 2008 Technology Grants for Rural Schools program
2008 Technology Grants for Rural Schools program
Technology grants for schools in rural areas
Monday, June 9, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 06/10/2008
Pushing the envelope with interactive video-conferencing. This site is a clearinghouse manager of online video/video conferencing Professional Development and Content material. Very informative site.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 05/20/2008
TeacherTube - Digital Students @ Analog Schools
Digital Students vs. Analog Schools
I love it! I get that there needs to be a shift in how we educate the students of now and the future because they experience the material differently than we did. Why don't more teachers respond to the need for change, because what we are doing isn't working!vickiwiki / Assessment Using Web 2 0 Tools
I like this list of tools. It's not the longest or most comprehensive, but it looks at them as formative assessment tools which is the real value of most web 2.0 tools.
- I like these tools and like that online polling tools as formative feedback!! - post by rodaniel
Thursday, April 17, 2008
Graphing with Students
Representing data is an important and difficult concept for students. Providing direct instruction and notes on different types of graphs, how to read graphs, and how to represent data in different graphs is a great start to getting students to understand graphing. It's the next step where students really learn graphing. Students need the opportunity to read graphs from multiple sources, create graphs, compare/analyze different types of graphs, and discuss issues in creating different graphs. All of these components allow students to make connections, solidify their understanding, and communicate in multiple ways with their peers and teachers about the concepts.
It was interesting to explore for a few minutes different free, easy to use resources that help teachers create opportunities these goals in dynamic and engaging ways.
Getting Students to read graphs:
There are lots of places to get relevant graphs of data. USA Today may be one of the best sites to get students access to
The newspaper online publishes multiple graphs on a daily basis. In the sports section a quick poll on the most impressive baseball milestone about to be passed was a quick, engaging example of a bar graph. In the money section, the daily track of the NASDAQ, DJIA, and USA today Internet 50 are all tracked using updated broken line graphs. With a five minute exploration, I found examples of a pie graph in realty, six different polls that represent data, and several tables of data. Students could easily explore the site, collect examples and analyze the chart and representation of the data. Another great site for quickly finding multiple representations of data was Swivel.com. What a great site for data. The site is free and full of data sets and graphs already made for those data.
The students could easily compare different types of graphs and create new graphs that represent the data in different ways. I am really excited about this site, but a warning about some of the data sets being inappropriate for student use.
To continue the creation of charts there are several other sites, applications that are fantastic for this. It's always easiest to start with the software that is usually accessible in the classroom, and I think Microsoft Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheet application are fantastic for this purpose, easy for students to learn and manipulate, and easily accessible. If you are more adventurous and want to explore applications on the web, I encourage you to check out this resource beyond Swivel; Create a Graph, Kid's Zone- Learning with NCES. Fully functioning chart building capabilities and very student friendly. Not as rigorous as some of the other sites, but very functional, especially for middle school.
I know data representation is a critical concept for students in today's setting and I hope others will explore the potential sites available to them for getting students engaged in graphing beyond the basics.
It was interesting to explore for a few minutes different free, easy to use resources that help teachers create opportunities these goals in dynamic and engaging ways.
Getting Students to read graphs:
There are lots of places to get relevant graphs of data. USA Today may be one of the best sites to get students access to
The newspaper online publishes multiple graphs on a daily basis. In the sports section a quick poll on the most impressive baseball milestone about to be passed was a quick, engaging example of a bar graph. In the money section, the daily track of the NASDAQ, DJIA, and USA today Internet 50 are all tracked using updated broken line graphs. With a five minute exploration, I found examples of a pie graph in realty, six different polls that represent data, and several tables of data. Students could easily explore the site, collect examples and analyze the chart and representation of the data. Another great site for quickly finding multiple representations of data was Swivel.com. What a great site for data. The site is free and full of data sets and graphs already made for those data.
The students could easily compare different types of graphs and create new graphs that represent the data in different ways. I am really excited about this site, but a warning about some of the data sets being inappropriate for student use.
To continue the creation of charts there are several other sites, applications that are fantastic for this. It's always easiest to start with the software that is usually accessible in the classroom, and I think Microsoft Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheet application are fantastic for this purpose, easy for students to learn and manipulate, and easily accessible. If you are more adventurous and want to explore applications on the web, I encourage you to check out this resource beyond Swivel; Create a Graph, Kid's Zone- Learning with NCES. Fully functioning chart building capabilities and very student friendly. Not as rigorous as some of the other sites, but very functional, especially for middle school.
I know data representation is a critical concept for students in today's setting and I hope others will explore the potential sites available to them for getting students engaged in graphing beyond the basics.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Opening and Closing a Lesson
I am doing a lesson study with Laura Calloway from Fairview Independent High School in Ashland, KY and she shared this great premise for a bell ringer around substitution. There are several things I like about this strategy:
it's:
open-ended, flexible, has students moving around (a little bit), has students developing rationale for doing something (even without a lot of direct instruction into the 'method'), is quick, and flexible!
She admits that it's not original (and what in education is?), but has a great sense of how to get students involved in the lesson quickly, get them thinking, and get them talking about math. She doesn't have a metal whiteboard to let the students slide the sentence strips around (which would be optimal), but she didn't let that deter her from adapting to tape.
In our conversation, we thought about using a slightly modified version for the closing activity. The modification would be to put all the steps on the board and let the students put them in order, while explaining the rationale for each step. I thought it was a great way of accessing the strategy, putting more emphasis on student leadership/thinking, and, again, creating an engagement opportunity. Just a nice flow to a lesson with emphasis on the introduction of the lesson, making connections to what they've already learned, and then creating synthesis by letting the students go through a similar activity (they already understand the process) to express their understanding. If multiple sets of the other problem are created, then students who solve the problem a different way could show their process; what a great discussion that would create. Students could work in small groups to arrange the sentence strips in any order they wanted. Another group could graph the system and solving graphically to check the work. The teacher could create his/her own order with a specific oder in mind to spark conversation if the method presented didn't go in the order or manner desired. The conversation about getting the same answer but doing a different order would be incredibly valuable.
The other thing I like about this strategy is that it isn't expensive, but it is incredibly flexible, and creates all kinds of opportunities to create connections for students in any concept learning. Once the structure is introduced the students would be able to manage the process very quickly and begin to process the mathematics easier (at least that's what I think). I wanted to share with others this simple sentence strip activity that I think has great potential.
it's:
open-ended, flexible, has students moving around (a little bit), has students developing rationale for doing something (even without a lot of direct instruction into the 'method'), is quick, and flexible!
She admits that it's not original (and what in education is?), but has a great sense of how to get students involved in the lesson quickly, get them thinking, and get them talking about math. She doesn't have a metal whiteboard to let the students slide the sentence strips around (which would be optimal), but she didn't let that deter her from adapting to tape.
In our conversation, we thought about using a slightly modified version for the closing activity. The modification would be to put all the steps on the board and let the students put them in order, while explaining the rationale for each step. I thought it was a great way of accessing the strategy, putting more emphasis on student leadership/thinking, and, again, creating an engagement opportunity. Just a nice flow to a lesson with emphasis on the introduction of the lesson, making connections to what they've already learned, and then creating synthesis by letting the students go through a similar activity (they already understand the process) to express their understanding. If multiple sets of the other problem are created, then students who solve the problem a different way could show their process; what a great discussion that would create. Students could work in small groups to arrange the sentence strips in any order they wanted. Another group could graph the system and solving graphically to check the work. The teacher could create his/her own order with a specific oder in mind to spark conversation if the method presented didn't go in the order or manner desired. The conversation about getting the same answer but doing a different order would be incredibly valuable.
The other thing I like about this strategy is that it isn't expensive, but it is incredibly flexible, and creates all kinds of opportunities to create connections for students in any concept learning. Once the structure is introduced the students would be able to manage the process very quickly and begin to process the mathematics easier (at least that's what I think). I wanted to share with others this simple sentence strip activity that I think has great potential.
Friday, March 28, 2008
One sided conversations
I work as an instructional coach in schools all the time and love it. I pride myself in being able to listen to what teachers want and explore their needs. I'm a good listener (although I'm not sure my wife would say so). My frustration is that I'm doing all the talking in this conversation about developing math lessons.
I know that I haven't done a good job of advertising this project, or developing a consistent posting schedule, or lots of things but I'm still frustrated. I see people are coming to the blog and wiki, but they obviously aren't being pushed to add to the conversation.
I am enjoying being able to organize some of my thoughts and by publishing them I am creating a better understanding of my own thinking, and that is valuable. I am learning how to use the structures of wikis and blogs better; and understanding some of the pitfalls and just how big they can be (consistency, audience, strong thinking, etc.). It's been a good experience so far, but I'll be honest it is a little frustrating. I am getting tired of talking to myself.
I am going to make a concerted effort to increase my use and output on this project to see if it has any legs, but I have a concern that it won't take off. I'll be left with a good idea that I will need to reflect on, and analyze to learn what i need to do differently to make it more successful. I have this gut feeling that there is an audience for a project like this, but I haven't accessed it yet.
My plan for growth is to get a larger library of information posted, blog about it more consistently, reference it intentionally in my f2f work with teachers, explore for similar projects and add to their voices, and shoot a couple of twitter comments out to see if anyone else is interested.
This is a real interesting concept for me as a learner. I have lots of ideas. However, now that I'm not in a classroom to try them out everyday, see how things fit, and see how things morph into better ideas, I have no outlet for my creativity. That was the genesis of this little experiment, that and as a way of organizing my learning for my own thinking, but now it's gotten a little personal in that I'm out here and not sure if anyone is listening.
I know that I haven't done a good job of advertising this project, or developing a consistent posting schedule, or lots of things but I'm still frustrated. I see people are coming to the blog and wiki, but they obviously aren't being pushed to add to the conversation.
I am enjoying being able to organize some of my thoughts and by publishing them I am creating a better understanding of my own thinking, and that is valuable. I am learning how to use the structures of wikis and blogs better; and understanding some of the pitfalls and just how big they can be (consistency, audience, strong thinking, etc.). It's been a good experience so far, but I'll be honest it is a little frustrating. I am getting tired of talking to myself.
I am going to make a concerted effort to increase my use and output on this project to see if it has any legs, but I have a concern that it won't take off. I'll be left with a good idea that I will need to reflect on, and analyze to learn what i need to do differently to make it more successful. I have this gut feeling that there is an audience for a project like this, but I haven't accessed it yet.
My plan for growth is to get a larger library of information posted, blog about it more consistently, reference it intentionally in my f2f work with teachers, explore for similar projects and add to their voices, and shoot a couple of twitter comments out to see if anyone else is interested.
This is a real interesting concept for me as a learner. I have lots of ideas. However, now that I'm not in a classroom to try them out everyday, see how things fit, and see how things morph into better ideas, I have no outlet for my creativity. That was the genesis of this little experiment, that and as a way of organizing my learning for my own thinking, but now it's gotten a little personal in that I'm out here and not sure if anyone is listening.
Content vs. Process
It is interesting that I focus on content almost exclusively in this early posts of this little experiment, but I value process almost as much, if not more, in my teaching. So in an effort to make sure that I open the discussion about processes. I am posting a short little article that I submitted to a virtual teaching newsletter. It is about note taking routines and structures with an example from a math class. I will open a conversation about note taking/summarizing at the wiki.
Note-Taking in a Hybrid Classroom
By Roland O’Daniel, CTL
This article features strategies from the Collaborative Model for Content Literacy developed by
the Collaborative for Teaching and Learning
Introduction
In the hybrid classroom there is a unique opportunity for students to explore mathematical concepts on their own using on-line tools and then come together in a face to face setting to share what they have observed and learned. In the hybrid setting students often struggle with working in the independent, virtual learning environment and gathering important information while in that environment. Information must be synthesized in a very different way. Students have to identify what is important, what they understand, do not understand, and questions that they have. It is important to intentionally and explicitly develop structures in the classroom to help students interact with the material.
Note-Taking Skills and Strategies
Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock (2001) have identified nine strategies that work most effectively in their book, Classroom Instruction That Works. Among those essential strategies are summarizing and note taking. These strategies promote greater comprehension and understanding by inviting students to analyze a concept to interpret what is essential and then put the material in their own words. Skills that are utilized in good note taking structures include; substituting, deleting, and keeping some things and identifying the important components of the material presented.
In order to develop these skills in the hybrid classroom, teachers create intentional and thorough routines with the students. The routines must be supported and scaffolded in the face–to-face setting so that students will be able to understand the processes well enough to use on their own in the independent virtual environment. For instance, teachers might ask students to question what is unclear, to identify important topics, and to predict what will happen next in the material. One tool for helping students create these types of interactions with notes is a Double Entry organizer. In the left column students take notes as usual and in the right hand column students identify questions, make connections to previous material, and identify material that confuses them.
Teachers who use a Double Entry organizer allow students the opportunity interact with the material by stopping, have students review the their notes for interactions, and during lesson closure follow up with the interactions very intentionally through whole group discussion or small group share out. Teachers introduce and support this structure while in the regular classroom setting and then transfer the process to the independent learning environment. Doing so reinforces independent student learning and also models for students who are struggling with working in a virtual environment.
Conclusion
When students are in the virtual environment, providing the expectation that the same note-taking structure as the classroom is used will help reinforce the understanding and create better note takers. If students are not in a lab setting, providing note-taking guides that have prompts for interactions will help reinforce the process with students. It is imperative that teachers support the process in classroom discussions when the classes are back together, so that students see value in taking the time to review and synthesize the notes. The importance of note taking is more than just remembering the highlights of class. A good note-taking routine sets a tone of communication in the classroom and provides students a tool for learning the material more effectively.
Classroom Instruction That Works by R. J. Marzano, D. J. Pickering, and J. E. Pollock, 2001, Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Subjects Matter, Every teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading, Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman, 2004,
Attachment A
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Saturday, March 22, 2008
Pushing thought about Systems (of Linear Equations)
I've been doing some work with a couple of teachers who have the challenge of teaching in a hybrid environment, and we are pushing our thinking about how to try to engage their students in higher level conversations about the material. It has been a challenge for the teachers to work with a mandated software curriculum and manage the conversion into a hybrid environment at the same time. It seems to me to be a classic example of managing lots of changes and trying to figure them all out at the same time (very tough to do, in my opinion).
Anyway, I've put a couple example lessons on the collaboration wiki and am opening it up to input from anyone interested in talking about how to make the lessons better, discuss the strategies, tweak the resources, get feedback about how the lessons went if used with your students.
I will say one of the foci is to really push the development of taking notes and synthesizing their learning while in the independent learning environment. We (the teachers and I) have had several conversations about how to manage that process better. We've studied how to make formative assessment decisions while trying to develop note-taking guides for the computer lessons, without making them basic fill-in the blank and shutting down student thinking.
I look forward to capturing some conversation about this topic and these lessons.
Anyway, I've put a couple example lessons on the collaboration wiki and am opening it up to input from anyone interested in talking about how to make the lessons better, discuss the strategies, tweak the resources, get feedback about how the lessons went if used with your students.
I will say one of the foci is to really push the development of taking notes and synthesizing their learning while in the independent learning environment. We (the teachers and I) have had several conversations about how to manage that process better. We've studied how to make formative assessment decisions while trying to develop note-taking guides for the computer lessons, without making them basic fill-in the blank and shutting down student thinking.
I look forward to capturing some conversation about this topic and these lessons.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Using a Wiki to Encourage Exploration
I haven't given up on this idea of creating a place where teachers come together to analyze lessons for how the lessons allow students to develop their understanding of mathematics through literacy (that would be writing, reading, and speaking/listening) strategies. I've created a wiki to perhaps create a modality that is more conducive to sharing.
So the goal of the wiki is to share lessons that you have created with other like minded teachers willing to create a common understanding of how to integrate literacy into your math class. If you want to add to someone elses lesson please feel free.
I envision this wiki to be a resource where people can share what they've created or adapted and get feedback on a lesson to make it even better. Just be sure to cite all resources that you used to get information. This isn't about being totally original, but sharing, tweaking, and improving good lessons.It's an experiment that's been rolling around in my head for a while. I hope that others share a view of how this might be a useful teacher resource.
It is important though that we model for our students how to cite our sources correctly. If it is not your original work make sure that we give credit where credit is due. Also, if it is copyrighted to make sure that you have permission to post.
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