The Purpose and the Audience

I have been reading a lot about how students work harder to create quality products if they have a purpose other than finishing an assignment and if their audience is someone other than their teacher. That is why students tend to put more time and effort into projects or products that will be shared with an audience on the web or in the school.

I had a chance to observe this in a 1st grade class I taught for two days last week. One little boy's math work and writing were hardly legible. He worked as quickly as possible, writing over mistakes and paying little attention to spacing his letters and words. After finishing his work on my second afternoon with his class, he was working on a drawing with merry crismas written at the top. He asked me how to spell Christmas. I told him where he needed to add an h and a t. I watched him stick the letters in and pause to look at it. Then he carefully erased the word and rewrote it neatly. I smiled as I thought about the quality of his work on a project of his choosing versus one I had assigned. I grinned even more when he handed his finished product, a Christmas card, to me on his way out the door.

Letting Them Think

I learned a lesson while teaching a math lesson on bar graphs yesterday. We were working through a page together and I was asking for responses to the questions in the book. Which food was the most popular? How many more boys than girls liked pizza? How many students were surveyed? Most students were struggling to stay focused, so I decided to follow advice I have read on others' blogs - ask open-ended questions. I said, "What can you tell be about this graph." Hands I hadn't seen raised in two days shot up, and all of the responses were good! The students were now looking at and interpreting the graphs by themselves and they were seeing things I had not noticed. It was great!

If I had my own class, my next step would be to let them use a website I discovered this week to create their own visualizations. At http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/ , they can see relationships among data points, compare a set of values, track rises and falls over time, see the parts of a whole, analyze a text, and see the world. What a way to learn!

Thank You, Teachers

Teachers do many things that make my job as a sub much easier. Here are just  a few:

Attendance/lunch count - This may seem easy until you realize all the places students may be before they settle in your classroom - breakfast, getting extra reading help, in the library, etc. The sub has no way of knowing who is really absent when the bell rings. The day gets off to a good start when this process is automatic. Some teachers use a pocket chart labeled with students' names. The cards in the pockets have hot lunch on one end and cold lunch on the other. The cards are backwards in the morning, and students turn the cards around with their choice on top. Some classrooms have magnetic name tags that students place under the lunch column of their choice. Some teachers have a SMART Board chart and students slide their names under the column headings. In these classes, students take care of the lunch count before heading off to other places. All of these methods take care of both attendance and lunch. Life is good!

SMART Board file access - All of the teachers I've subbed for have left all of the files I need to use open on their computers. That works great unless I accidentally close one and have no idea what path to follow to find it again. Last week, a teacher solved that problem for me. He put a folder labeled with the date on his computer desktop. It contained everything I needed that day. FANTASTIC! Since the folder contained copies of his original files, he didn't need to worry that I would accidentally save any changes.

Workbook key - One teacher took a blank math workbook and made a teacher's key. It is so much easier to use than the bulky teacher's manual that has small snapshots of the student workbook pages. It helps both the teacher and the sub.

Bad Math

Over the last year, I have created a Diigo library bookmarking 200+ websites that I use and recommend to other teachers and parents. http://www.diigo.com/user/suedowning  I am especially interested in math tutorials and videos that students can use to supplement and expand on the math lessons in the classroom. The videos give struggling students the opportunity to explore difficult concepts and processes. They can stop and replay them. They can find varied explanations of the same thing, hopefully finding one that makes sense to them.

Most of the websites I bookmark come from blogs I follow. I always spend time exploring the content, trying out the games, and watching the videos before I create my bookmark. Today I discovered that I may need to make my investigation more thorough before accepting the information as useful and valid.

This morning, I found a collection of YouTube math tutorial videos made by a community of teachers. I watched several videos and was about to make a bookmark when I came across the Partial Products Algorithm video. I taught this method during my student teaching, so I took time to watch it. I was very disappointed.

The problem: 28 x 32

The explanation: multiply the ones, multiply the tens, add the 2 products

The final product: 616

I did write a comment asking them to recheck the math. I suggested they use all 4 partial products: 2 x 8, 2 x 20, 30 x 8, 30 x 20 = 16 + 40 + 240 + 600 = 896. I also mentioned that a quick estimation (30 x 30) should have indicated that the answer would be very close to 900.

Everybody makes mistakes, and quite a bit of our learning results from our mistakes. However, I think some form of quality control, such as peer review, should be performed before these videos are uploaded to the web.

Bad math is worse than no math at all. Now, I wonder if other websites I have recommended contain information that will confuse rather than clarify.

Browsers and the Web

The Google Chrome Team published an informative online book entitled 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. Read it here: http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home

Storybird

I helped 3rd graders write stories at http://storybird.com/ yesterday. They had been on the website once before and were anxious to create more stories. The author selects pictures and adds text to create the cover and pages. A free account is required to save and publish the books. After they have been saved, but not yet published, books can be edited. This is nice because it is not necessary to finish in one session. Students can also invite someone to collaborate on a book via e-mail. Once a book is published, it can no longer be edited, but it can be deleted by the author. The author has a choice of keeping a book private and accessible only be e-mail invitation, or making it public.

As the students were working, I thought about reading how publishing students' writings for a larger audience than their teacher or classmates motivates them to do their very best. I could see this was happening.

Today, I decided to give it a try and am now a published author. You can read about Max the monkey here: http://storybird.com/books/max-the-monkey-learns-to-make-friends/ Also, check out some of the other stories by clicking on the Read tab.

My Son/Daughter Hates Math

What came first, the chicken or the egg. Do students hate math because they have found little success with it, or do they find little success because they hate it? I think the lack of success brings about the negative feelings, which then lead to more failures. Whatever the reason, it becomes a vicious cycle of struggle, failure, and disdain for math.

Almost 20 years ago, I accepted my first mentoring job when a friend told me her son was failing algebra. Algebra was my favorite subject in school, so I started working with this young man. I hoped my  enthusiasm and encouragement would replace I can't with I can in his mind. He did start believing in his ability to master the subject and finished the course successfully. He now works with numbers daily as an actuary.

This week I had a similar experience, and I am anxious to begin the challenge of helping a young lady improve her math skills and her attitude about math. This time I have the internet to help me. Technology has made available unlimited tutorials, videos, examples, and practice problems. It also provides numerous ways for us to communicate remotely. I am sure one of my favorites will be to simultaneously edit a Google Doc. I am excited to put these new tools to work!