The problems with Math

I had a few minutes today waiting in the doctor’s office (actually it was more like a few hours.  Can I charge the doctor for my time?) I was thinking about some of the problems in math instruction and the ones that I am encountering as I explore a redesign of our online courses.

• Students feel isolated; they cannot get the support they need when they need it.
• Student cannot achieve manageable milestones.
• They do not have the prerequisite concepts and skills before they start a math course.
• Student go too fast through the courses.
• Do not master a concept before moving on to the next concept.
• They want a tutor to teach them, not the textbook.
• Student don’t explore the multimedia resources if it is not integral to the course.
• Student don’t read  the textbook.

Some of my ideas about how to address these problems are:

Create chat rooms for each concept that is being taught.  If the student needs help, they can join the chat room and discuss the problems with other students who are also grappling with the same problems.  Or have a TA online that the students can call or skype or set up virtual office hours.

Create a milestones in the course that students must meet before them can move on to new material.  Make sure that they understand the concept through some sort of assessment before they can move on to new material.

Move a word problem from the end of the lesson to the beginning of the lesson and use it to start a conversation.  Allow the word problem to drive the instruction and introduce the concepts to be learned. Make the word problem visual

Make math matter

I was assigned as the instructional designer for the Independent Study Math portfolio  for both high school and university courses.  As I reviewed the current online courses, I realized that the textbook is the instructor for these courses.  The instructional design of the courses is learning outcomes, discussion material which is usually what is already in the textbook, homework assignment, then a test.   The textbook do not put the concepts in a realistic, relevant context. I am looking at a redesign of the instruction.  Is it possible to design a math course within the context of other disciplines; for example, my husband teaches computer vision and his student have commented that they finally understand calculus as he explains it in the context of computer vision.   I know that I understood English much better after I took a foreign language.  My husband was helping our teenage son  with his geometry homework when my son exclaimed, “this is useless. When am I ever going to use this.” My husband replied “Geometry is very useful in animation.”  Newton, Galileo, daVinci observed phenomena that occurred in the world and they used a language to explain these real world observations.

Here are some of my ideas:

• Think about how to design a math lesson that incorporates a way to predict students preconceptions, and includes metacognition.  Are there tools? Can we use reciprocal teaching to predict, clarify, question, and summarize as a model for math instruction.
• Divide the math curriculum into stories.  Think of kindergarten.  Every month is something special. Each week of the month has meaning.  Kindergarten is a a series of projects interspersed with games and challenges.
• If math is a language, then why not teach it like you would teach a language.  How do students learn language?
• I know that I learned Spanish by living in the country that spoke Spanish.  Can I take my students where math lives?  Immerse them in that environment.

Out of the mouth of babes

My children and I went tothe university today and stopped by my husband’s class to put up a key.  His class was already in session when we arrived.  As we were leaving the classroom,  my five-year old son looked up at his dad and said, “Dad, I love you because you are a teacher.”  You could hear the students in the classroom make an audible sigh.  Out of the mouth of babes.

On a separate note,  graduation day is 10 days away.  It is hard to believe that I have finished my graduate work.  I remember the day that I defended my thesis and passed.  I felt like there should be a 21 gun salute followed by a ticker tape parade but it was rather anticlimatic.   I guess the pomp and circumstance comes on graduation day.   Regardless,  I have accomplished a goal that I had set some time ago and it feels good.

People are referring to my posts.

This is the second time that someone referred to one of my posts.  This is very exciting to me because I wasn’t sure if my posts could offer anything of interest to someone else, but it turns out that I may have been wrong.  The experience of blogging my ideas has been life-changing for me.  I feel empowered to share my ideas more.

Slideshare, Diigo, and Analytics

For those who know that I am taking a New Media, Social Media and Learning course as part of my graduate coursework,  we were assigned to explore Slideshare, Diigo, and Google analytics.  If you want some interesting information on using technology for differentiated instruction, check out Instructional Technology Coaching Meeting. The slideshow talks about ways we can differentiate instruction either by the way we assess student’s knowledge, the way that the student gains access to the knowledge and the depth of the content that the student explores.  It also gives some good tools for differentiated instruction.

The other slideshow that I found is Instructional Design for the Semantic Web. I am interested in the concept of the semantic web because of its potential to make a student’s thinking process visible and where there are breakdowns or holes in their understanding of a concept.  

Another slideshow I found intriguing is Instructional design 3.0. This slideshow lists some emerging technologies and examples that can be used by instructional designers to design for the Web 3.0:  

• virtual worlds and online games (apparently there is a book that is being released called Virtual Worlds, Real Libraries: Librarians and Educators in Second Life and other multi-user virtual environments )
• modular content and an example
• mobile devices (like iPhone)
• Interactive multimedia
• Artificial intelligence ( there is a book Artificial Intelligence and Learning Environment by Clancey and Soloway)
•  Semantic Web (an excellent explanation of what the semantic web is and its implications and applications)

I have not been successful at highlighting and annotating a blog entry.  I have tried several times.  I know that Diigo goes not support Safari.  I downloaded Diigolet.  Is this the problem?  I am wondering if anyone else has had difficulty in annotating with Diigo.  

Thoughts on web analytics from an instructional designer’s point of view, not a business or marketing perspective, are: (1) I think that analytics is a good tool for designers to see how they can improve their instructional designs by watching how users access the site and materials and (2) I also see analytics providing a resource into the minds of those who use the instruction which can inform future designs. 

In thinking about how these tools can be used to share the gospel,  I can see Diigo as being very helpful in that I can highlight certain parts of church articles and then annotate it with my experiences and perspective.  Web Analytics may be helpful to see what topics visitors to the church web sites go to first. This may reveal what is on the minds of church members and nonmembers which could  help to tailor messages to not only church members but nonmembers.  I can see this having an impact on missions where a mission could have a website and then the missionaries could see who is coming to the site and what the visitors most pressing needs are.  This can help the missionaries to better serve the people in their area, not just in sharing the gospel but helping them with other needs.

podcasting, screencasting and video-sharing, oh my

I received an incoming link to my post about Heekya (thanks again, David in DC).  This is the first time that I have actually received a response to one of my blog postings.  I have to say it feels good to share with others and have others share with you, especially to have someone respond favorably to one of your posts. 

Before I launch into what I have found this week,  Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the amount of information that is coming at you every day?  Before wikis, RSS feeds, blogs, etc,  they only way you got information was through the radio, TV and newspaper and you could also turn it off if it was too much information.  Not now,  every morning when I get up I have at least 100 RSS feeds to go through and at least a couple of facebook friends to accept and instead of being woken up to the birds singing,  I am greeted by my twitterific account chirping at intermittent intervals.  Talk about hitting the ground running every morning.  Man,  it is better than coffee in the morning. . . well,  maybe not as good as a Starbucks’ Mocha Latte but that was a previous life. . . now it is Good Morning, Web 2.0

By I digress, I am researching educational uses of podcasts, screencasts, and video-sharing. 

As I was scanning the web for educational uses of podcasts, I came across a gem of a website.Education Podcast Network.  I also came across a list of educational uses of podcasts that I found helpful.  Educational Uses of Podcasting

As I continued persuing the web,  I came across a link called Give the Students What They Want by Mark Ott, from Jackson Community College.  He illustrates in a screencast what he is doing in the classroom to use screencast and gives examples.  

Teachinghacks.com has an interesting wiki on Video-sharing where it describes what video-sharing is, educational ideas around video-sharing, other educators using video-sharing, VideoEDU that gives examples of educational video.  It also describes how video-sharing works, software and hardware that is needed and available, what to use to capture video,  information about pre-production and post-production.  It has everything that a layman would need to know on how to do video-sharing, plus helpful references for educators.  I found a similar site called Video from Learning Technologies Centre that gives an excellent overview of video use online, examples of video use in education, video creation, video editing, video sharing/hosting.  A good resource for those who are new to video-sharing.

Coming soon.  I am working on creating two screencast for my IPT 287 students on how to set up a Google account and how to set up a wiki that I can post to our class wiki and I am also looking for a way to share some on my ideas about how I developed my testimony and my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints either through a video or a podcast.  Look for my next post later in the day to see what I come up with.

Heekya

I received a comment on my post about digital storytelling from David Adewumi from Washington, D.C.  He writes, Heekya which is an digital storytelling tool that allows people to create stories that happen in real life.  You can use it as a digital scrapbook or you can add to stories that are happening in the world.  It is like the wikipedia for story-telling where others can come and create their version of the feature story, whether it is about a world event or a personal event (wedding).  I can see a great potential for educational uses of this tool.  Students can express their viewpoint about a specific event in history, current event, or storyline in a book or a topic.   It also helps students to see the viewpoints on others on the same event or topic.  This tools looks very promising and I am interested in using it to see what other possibilities it has for personal and educational use.

Flickr makes everything delicious

I created an account in Cheryl\’s Flickr.  I uploaded some pictures of my family.  I searched for educational uses of Flickr and came across an interesting article flickrinclassroom. The article suggested the following ways that Flickr can be used:

 

1. Using single images as writing prompt, sometimes called Flickton
2. Multiple image digital storytelling projects
3. Creating slides shows within Flickr 
4. Virtual Field Trips 
5. Creation of visual arguments, e.g. biology classroom-The Case for Genetic Engineering 
6. Illustration of Poetry with Flickr, or Flickr meets Carl Sandburg 
7. Using Flickr with Google Earth to teach Geography because of the geotagging
8.  Visual documentation of school events 
9. Visual documentation of student artwork and other school products 
10.  Creation of digital visual portfolios, using the photoset function of Flickr 
11. Social software applications:  how to tag, how to make comments 
12. Delivery of school/classroom visual information via RSS  
13. Intellectual property rights lesson using Flickr Creative Commons licensing 
14. The use of third party Flickr applications to produce classroom products: 

•  Motivational posters 
• Magazine Covers 
•  Movie Posters 
•  Flickr slideshow 
• Mosaic Makers

Go to Resources about Flickr for more information.

I am not sure why I would use Flickr since I have a Facebook account and I have more file space there.  My one observation is looking at both Flickr and Del.ici.ous as well as Facebook and MySpace last week as well as Blogger or wordpress is that they all seem to offer the same thing.  You can use Delicious as a blog.  You can use Facebook to photo-share.  You can use Flickr for video sharing (like YouTube).  I know that I am stating obvious but  it seems like a convergence is developing between social objects, social networks, and sharing. What will the social online landscape look like in 2 years or 5 years?

Cheryl\’s delicious account. I actually used del.ici.ous to search for some sites that talk about the educational uses of delicious.  Here is what I found: Top 10 ways to use Delicious,Tags Help Make Libraries Del.ici.ous, Using Del.ici.ous in Education (this site gives a list of references on how del.ici.ous is being used in the education.  I like the ability to link to other people’s del.ici.ous sites that are doing research or work in areas that are of interested to me.  I found a great del.ici.ous site on PLEs that had a lot of resources on how people are using PLEs in education.  The great thing about del.ici.ous is that you do not have to “reinvent the wheel”.  So much of the work and searching as already been done and you can tap into it and find what is applicable for your topic of interest.

I have been reading Web 2.0: new tools, new schools.In the book, it gives some uses for both Flickr and Del.ici.ous.  Teachers have been using Flickr to go digital storytelling.  From the book Web 2.0 new tool,  new schools the authors write, “Students begin by composing their narrative, and from it, synthesize the story into its critical elements to develop a script.  They add multimedia to the script by including photographs, music, and audio then put it all together in a logical sequence.” A English teacher uses Flickr to illustrate personal history narratives that are similar to the type that they are reading in class.  They also illustrate the events behind protest songs as they answer the question “How can you maintain a just and equitable society?”  A PE teacher has students create public service announcements on addiction and asked them to take two relevant statistics and make them come alive using Flickr in a digital story.  

Some teacher are using Del.ici.ous as a cross-curricular resource.  For example, a health and PE teacher conducts a Web search to find sites on disease, finds CDC site,  and adds it to the school’s social bookmarking service.  The health/PE teacher is trying to find ways to integrate science issues into his health topic for the week.  The science teacher is covering genetics the same week so the two teacher get together and review the sites on the social bookmarking service.   Meanwhile, the social studies teacher is scanning sites for tags to genetics in the social bookmarking service.  They will be discussing genetic engineering current events in class and she comes across the health and PE teacher CDC site along with other sites that have been tagged by the science teacher. 

Some teachers are using Del.ici.ous as research tool.  For example, student teams work on a project and can divide their topic into subtopics. They can create topic folders and store URLS together under the appropriate folder, then they can get together and share what they have found on line and select the web sites that are the most relevant to their project.  The ability to search Delicious using tags helps the students narrow the amount of information that they need to search through. The students also learn to identify what is valuable or not to their project. 

There is also an Appendix article by David Warlick called A Day in the Life of Web 2.0 that gives an interesting case study on how a teacher can use Web 2.0 tools in their classroom and in the school.  The article can be found in Technology & Learning, volume 27, Issue 3, October 2006.  You can find it online at BYU Library. 

A journey through social networks

As I have been searching the Internet and reading blogs, it has sparked ideas that may seem or are a stream of consciousness. Bear with my mental journey through social network.  My first stop was a site that shows some good examples and ideas of using social networking tools in the classroom.  http://www.edtech.neu.edu/teach/online_pedagogy/social_networking/  Since reading Lave and Wenger’s book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation as well as following Wenger’s work Communities of Practice, I am interested in how we can use his model in schools.  There is a lot of research and case studies on CoPs’ uses in business and professional development, but not in education.  I think that the Web 2.0 technologies may have just removed the barriers to fully using the concept of CoPs in the classroom.  Situated learning (the theory behind Communities of Practice) is putting learning in the context in which that learning would or does live.  I thought about how students could use LinkedIn to find mentors and participate where the real learning happens. 

My second stop was reading about data portability.  I watched a video by Chris Pidillo What is social networking? and it generated this idea: “If our students can be or are creators and publishers of content instead of consumers of content,  what happens to the content that they create on SNSs.  What happens to the content that I create for my class or that we collaboratively create together?  I find it ironic that the students are the creators but not the owners.  An interesting issue for copyright law.

Next stop.  A list of social networks in education http://socialnetworksined.wikispaces.com/ This site is useful because it gives you an idea of what kinds of social networks are being created.  My observation is that not many educational SNSs are being created by students which brings up another thought: “  What if students who were tired with the school system and who were tired of being bored, got together and collectively demanded a different way to be educated or a different way to learn.  Is this possible?  Does it already exist?  Are there students out there who are tired of de facto standard of school and education?  Clay Shirky in his book “Here Comes Everybody” describes this as collective action.  Groups coming together with a shared goal.  I wonder what would happen if a school of students or an entire system of schools acted in a collective effort to change our educational system.  A revolution!

As I meandered around the Web, I found 2 sites voted the two best social educational networks:

• http://www.classroom20.com/
• http://www.education.ning.com

In reviewing these sites, I asked myself: ” What would drive my students to an educational SNS? ” Facebook is fine but I am not particularly draws to it.  My friends?  Usually when I engage with my friends, we are doing something even if it is only hanging out watching a video or talking.  I can see meeting my friends on YouTube to watch a video or on Flickr to see photos of their latest trip. I can meet my friends to talk about a job on LinkedIn.   I don’t know why I would meet them on Facebook.  It would be like my friends getting together and not doing anything (no talking, no interaction) If I was going to create a SNS for my classes,  what would be the draw. .  the social object(s)?  Flickr was not only created a world around photos by around the subject of photography.  Shirky uses the example of HDR photography, someone posted a photo where they used this technique.  Soon people where asking how they did it and the sharing and conversation started a trail of instruction.  How could I do that in my classroom?  Could I use the model of Flickr and YouTube in creating my own SNS? Do I have a student post a problem that they solved and explain how they did?  Do I have other students post the same problem and how they solved it and explain it?  In the process of these students sharing and conversing about the problem, they, in effect, are creating an instruction. 

A brief stop at an excellent 4 minute video that illustrates what it means to be a digital native. (You can also check out the article written by Mark Prensky on the same topic. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.)

 The video is called “A vision of Students today.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o  It was created by a cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University. It is very thought provoking.  According to the video, if our students read may be 49% of their textbooks but they will read 2300 web pages and 1281 facebook profiles; if they will write only 42 pages but 500 pages of emails; if they spend 3 ½ hours online.  2 hours on cell phones. . . Why are we still using offline tools to teach?  To follow the discussion as it unfold go to  www.meditatedcultures.net/ksudigg.

Continuing on my web trip, I come across Social Networks- What is their strengths and weaknesse? and a 45 minute video from Clay Shirky about his book “Here Comes Everybody” Video from Clay Shirkey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqU He mentions an interesting point:  Freedom of the press, freedom to gather and freedom of speech have all come to together.  What a convergence.  I wonder what interesting laws and case laws that will generated.   I also found on the site a  Slideshow on the Future of Social Networking. 

A final mental point on the journey.  Right after I graduated my friends told me that I have to “network” in order to find a good job.  To bad that this was about 20 years before LinkedIn. 

People, not things acting as social objects?

In teaching an undergraduate course in Integrating Technology into Teaching this semester, I am having the students use wikis to create their final projects. As a I think about social objects in light of this assignment, I am wondering if I have created a social object in education. A project based assignment seems to have some of the elements of social objects: the IPT students contribute and collaborate on a special needs student and his/her learning need using learning strategies and technology. I thought that the social object was the project but it seems to me that the social object is the student, not the project based assignment. Can a person be a social object?  Can a person be “content that acts as a social object”, as Weller defines a social object?  In structuring my course instead of thinking about assignments and assessments,  maybe I should be thinking about the objects that my students can get engaged in, the tools that facilitate the social interaction could be the assignments as well as the wikis or blogs.  It seems to me that students would find a person (a special needs child) far more engaging than a project assignment. Just random thoughts about how I am designing my course. . . or how I can do it better.