MATH TEACHERS NEEDED! Collaborative Web Resource Project

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Permalink Reply by Bridget Perry-Gore on January 2, 2010 at 5:07am

Hi Kevin,
This sounds very interesting. I find that there are so many resources that keeping track of them is not so easy. I teach grade 7 and 8 math in a laptop school and this year decided to put the sites together in topics. I find that my students are not used to using the internet to learn (eg. tutorials) and they are not great and sieving through the information to see if it applies to them. Here is my site in its early stages.
http://sites.google.com/site/cyclingthroughmath/home.
My students have a fair bit of input as far as layout etc. goes and I am just learning to use Googlesites so its a little barebones.
Good luck in your endeavour.
Bridget

Permalink Reply by Robin Zaruba on January 13, 2010 at 6:36am

I'm interested in sharing ideas. Please let me know how I can help. I am currently using a fun online middle school math game with my 7th graders called Lure of the Labyrinth http://labyrinth.thinkport.org/www/ - check it out if you have a chance!

Permalink Reply by Bridget Perry-Gore on January 13, 2010 at 11:45am

Hi Robin,
I used this last year and am about to launch into it again. How are you finding it?
Bridget

Permalink Reply by Kevin Roberts on January 22, 2010 at 10:18pm

Hi Robin,

How integrated is this with your day to day lessons? I've never seen this one but it looks like a really cool resource. How long are your class periods? Do you integrate this every day, weekly? Would love to hear thoughts on how a resource like this gets implemented.

Kevin

Permalink Reply by Robin Zaruba on January 13, 2010 at 12:50pm

Lure of the Labyrinth? Great! Sometimes kids get locked out, but it's a quick sign in to get back in the game.

Permalink Reply by Bridget Perry-Gore on January 13, 2010 at 3:14pm

Do you find that they can follow the game? I noticed that the directions for finding rooms is more clear than it was last year...or maybe I "get" it this year. I will be getting my kids on it next week. Do you have them go directly to the puzzles?
Bridget

Permalink Reply by Robin Zaruba on January 13, 2010 at 3:22pm

I sometimes go thru a puzzle in class before we go to the lab. In the lab, they only play the game & solve the puzzles for coins. I played the game myself until I had to blow up the underground tunnels - it is very addicting! And it helped when they got stuck. I really love the Shipping Room, The Employee Cafeteria, The Warehouse, & The West Garden. I am not a fan of Mixing Vats at all.

Permalink Reply by Bridget Perry-Gore on January 13, 2010 at 6:03pm

The Cafeteria and the place where they mix the potions was my favourite....feel the same way about the vats. I haven't looked at it for a little while but I like your approach. I'll get going and maybe we can compare notes.

Permalink Reply by Kevin Roberts on January 15, 2010 at 9:41pm

Nice site Bridget....I like the collection of games and activities. I use Delicious to keep track of links on my site which becomes very powerful when you begin adding large amounts of content that covers a lot of different topics. I will definitely go through your site more deeply and add some of those links.

I've got a number of questions about your site and laptop program:
1. Do you or your students ever create videos or tutorials?
2. How do you teach and model appropriate use of copyright and citation with digital resources?
3. What software or tech applications do you use on a regular basis to enhance learning, research, or collaboration?
4. Do you spend time modeling research skills or have projects to help with their ability to sieve through information?
5. Have you ever tried www.weebly.com for website development? It's much more powerful than Blogger and user-friendly enough that students could use it easily too. They just opened up some options for educators as well if you want to create a student site network that you can monitor and interact with.
6. What types of laptops do you have? Do you have Smart boards or other Smart tech?

That's a lot of info, but I'm curious to see what other math teachers do in a laptop program. Thanks!

(If you are creating content for your courses, I would love to talk more about sharing resources that you would be comfortable posting online for everyone to access)

Kevin

Permalink Reply by Bridget Perry-Gore on January 17, 2010 at 11:22am

Hi Kevin,

1. Do you or your students ever create videos or tutorials?

Funny you should ask...I am planning to do have them make turorial videos in the next 2 weeks. We have 2 fairly inactive class blogs http://mathblog8abc.blogspot.com/ and http://mathblog8de.blogspot.com/ where I will have them post and then plan to put some of the better tutorials on the website. I am using Camstudio as it easily records in avi. which is accepted well by Blogger. I like Jing too and would prefer it but it's the posting to the blog which was not easy as I had to convert the format.

2. How do you teach and model appropriate use of copyright and citation with digital resources?

If they present I have them attache the site. I teach math so it's not usually an issue. They use www.tinyurl.com so links are small.


3. What software or tech applications do you use on a regular basis to enhance learning, research, or collaboration?

We use Smartboards daily...with a whiteboard on either side. They enjoy the practice sites which you saw. I am not a real fan of online tests. They tend to be multiple choice.

4. Do you spend time modeling research skills or have projects to help with their ability to sieve through information?

Yes, always on an informal, "by the way" basis. They usually go for the first link.

5. Have you ever tried www.weebly.com for website development? It's much more powerful than Blogger and user-friendly enough that students could use it easily too. They just opened up some options for educators as well if you want to create a student site network that you can monitor and interact with.

No. but opened an account and already it looks way more fun to use than Google Sites. I think i will set one up and launch it later. Thanks for that.

6. What types of laptops do you have? Do you have Smart boards or other Smart tech?

I am spoiled. Grade 9-11 have laptop Pros and 7-8 have Dells-changing to Mac next year.
Smartboards...i think there is 1 chalkborad left in the school...in the math office. Two green screens and video equipment at a crazy level. Basically, we have anything we want within reason.

I also use delicious.

Do you mind sharing yours? For my current courses (7/8 math) I tag lccmath7 and lccmath8.


What is your teaching situation?

Bridget

Permalink Reply by Kevin Roberts on January 22, 2010 at 10:10pm

Wow...what school is this? Sounds like lots of great resources available!

I work at the American School of Bombay, an international school in Mumbia, India. We have about 700 students grades preK-12. Middle school is about 150 students (6-8) and High School is about the same. We cater to international business people and diplomats mostly so there is a wide range of student nationalities but its all an Ameican -style curriculum with mostly American teachers.

We are a laptop school so each student starting at grade 6 purchases a tablet PC. I'm currently using a Dell but last year had a Fujitsu. We do not have any smart boards or other toys like that but do have TONS of software that we use for a variety of things.

I use DyKnow in class pretty much every day (a collaborative presentation tool) and we use TI-series calculators and software. I tried the video tutorial project for the first time last year and loved it's potential. We used Wink which is a screen capture tool but I wasn't a fan of how it turned out. Camstudio is sooooo much better. I agree that Jing is nice but you're right about the whole formatting issue and it is quite the memory hog which can make it slower and frustrating for kids.

I am actually about to do our first tutorial of the year in the next couple weeks. I will be having them create tutorials on various methods for solving systems of linear equations (8th grade Algebra 1 class). I would like to do one with my 6th grade class this year, but need to think a little more about how well that would work.

I love the idea of having students create tutorials for others. It's such a powerful learning process and ends up with such a tangible and useful product. I'm actually doing a presentation on this at a conference next month. Our school hosts a tech conference called ASB Unplugged that highlights all we do in different subject regarding tech integration and all the procedures we have in our IT department to make it all possible. It might be too late to sign up, but if you are interested in making a trip to India for a great conference, I may be able to pull some strings.

As for other math-specific integration, I use lots of web-based material. We use CPM curriculum which is pretty self-directed and doesn't need a lot of outside resources but I am always looking for extra things to add in to enhance and keep the class fresh and interesting. I think next year I am also going to start better integrating the use of some math software like Geometers Sketchpad or Geogebra. We do a little bit with Excel in the middle school but should probably do more. We are actually in the midst of discussions around our K-12 Tech standards and benchmarks and talking about what skills we address at each level.

As I started collecting resources and finding/creating materials last year I came to the conclusion that there were way too many math websites out there and although they had some really good ideas and resources sprinkled through them, there was no place to go that had it all in one place. I felt I was picking bits and pieces from various websites which was really time consuming and hard to manage so I started my own web project to put it all in one place.

It started as somewhere to provide resources for my classes but quickly turned into a mega-project with tutorials and materials for all major topics grade 6-12 as well as parent and teacher resources and information and support for math education. I've now committed to making this a public resource that is free and easy to use. I've already done a few presentations to parents, students, and faculty about the site and have begun creating an online presence including nearly 200 followers on Twitter.

I store all my links through this site and am publishing all content I create here as well so it can be used for my classes and the general public. I use delicious also, you can view it all here: http://www.mathmadesimple.org/links.html. If you are interesting in the scope and purpose of this project, there is some more info here: http://www.mathmadesimple.org/purpose-and-philosophy.html

If you are at all interesting in helping out with this project, let me know. I write all the tutorials and other content myself which is very time consuming and I would love some new perspectives and people willing to add some content of their own.

Outside of that web-project, I would also like to talk more about your video tutorial process and reflections to compare methods and ideas. If you would be willing to create some connection between classes it could also be very cool to possibly send these final tutorials back and forth so students can see their final products being used in a meaningful way. I don't know what your unit pacing is for the remainder of the year but it could be very neat if we could match up on a concept in some way. 8th graders will be finishing systems of equations in the next couple weeks then we do functions, rules of exponents, polynomials, and quadratics to end out the year.

Just some thoughts. It's always fun for students to see what other students are doing in similar courses around the world.

Kevin