Author: David Wees (page 48 of 97)

September 16, 2011 / 0 Comments

Moebius Noodles

A couple of weeks after I posted some resources for parents looking to teach their young kids about math, Maria Droujkova has introduced the Moebius Noodles project which is intended to build a book and a support site for parents who would like some support teaching math to their children.

In her own words, the reason she started this project is:

There are very few materials and no community support for smart math for babies and toddlers. Just try to find anything that is not about counting or simple shapes! Mathy parents create opportunities for their own kids, of course. But without support and resources, it’s very hard even for the rocket scientist mothers and fathers. We want to change that!
Peer-to-peer learning, research and development groups in mathematics education need a process for crowd-funding their projects. We are the trailblazers for other fabulous communities that want to make open and free math materials with the support of their members, such as the group developing materials for learning mathematics through music, the play math network, and the math circle problem-solving depository project.
We are creating OERs – Open Educational Materials. It means people can access, use, modify and share the materials for free [emphasis mine]. Imagine the project you support translated into any language in the world, and used freely to support young kids everywhere!
The activities are sustainable in many senses. You can use everyday household items and recycle materials for Moebius Noodles games.
If you are a parent or teacher who loves arts and crafts but is afraid of math, the book will help you teach your kids mathematics through your talents. If you are a math or science geek who envies other families always doing neat art projects, the arts-math bridge in the book goes both ways!

You can donate to her cause by clicking on the image below. At the time I posted this entry, Maria is about $4000 away from her goal.

September 16, 2011 / 2 Comments

Disguising flash cards as a game is deceptive

I’m reading The Connected Family by Seymour Papert, and ran into a quote which I found appropriate.

"…learning multiplication facts by putting flash cards on the screen is not a new way of learning math. It is a polished-up version of the old ways and promotes to greater heights their worst and most mechanical features. Moreover it is often done in a spirit which I see as dangerously dishonest: Disguising [emphasis mine] flash cards as a game introduces an element of deception that undermines two fundamental educational principles.

First, learning works best when the learner is a willing and conscious participant. Second, deception and dishonesty in the teaching process make a mockery of the idea that schools should develop moral values as well as knowledge of math or history." ~ Seymour Papert, p19, The Connected Family, 1996

It was timely, because just this morning, I saw this tweet from Jason Klein:

Just searching now on my iPhone for math in the App Store, these apps showed up.

Top five math apps on the iPhone

All five of these applications are based on learning math facts and arithmetic, and two of them even have the word "flash" in their name. Of the top twenty five math applications that I saw, 23 of them are essentially flash cards disguised as games. Two of them aren’t, one is called "Equation Genius" (it solves algebra equations), the other is called "Motion Math" (which lets students learn the relationship between fraction as symbols and visual representations of those fractions).

Could we please get more educators programming these apps? (If someone would donate me a Mac to work on, I’ll happily do it myself.)

September 16, 2011 / 6 Comments

Heading to the Computer Based Math conference in London, England

So I just got confirmation (and have paid for registration and my airfare AND found a place to stay – mostly) that I get to attend the Computer Based Math conference happening London, England on November 10th and 11th. I’m very excited about it!

I’m flying out of Vancouver on Tuesday, November 8th (after being in workshops all day with my colleagues), and arriving in London midday on the 9th. I’m at the conference on the 10th and 11th, and flying to Toronto on Sunday, November 13th, where I’ll be attending the Mindshare Learning Canadian Edtech conference on Monday, November 14th.

I have a place to stay arranged for my time in London (actually many offers of places to stay) but I could use a place to stay for the Sunday night I’ll be in Toronto. I’m trying to make this trip more economical for my school (since they are footing the bill) by staying with friends.

My hope is to find out more about how different people are using technology in math education specifically at the Computer Based Math conference, and to be part of the team trying to build a curriculum for math based on the assumption that students have computation devices with them whenever they need them. The big questions I have are, what does that kind of curriculum look like, and would it be effective for teaching math?

It will be strange to be at these conferences as it will be the first time in 2 years that I’ve attended a conference, and not presented. Maybe I’ll find a way to get to talk about some of what I do at one of these conferences anyway… even if I’m not officially on the schedule to present.

I’m posting this to let the people in my PLN know, and I’d love to connect with anyone else heading to these conferences that I’ve met via Twitter.

September 13, 2011 / 1 Comment

Social media for educators

I’m going to be presenting in a couple of days for some new teachers on social media. I’ve created a presentation (see below), and I’d like some feedback on it. It’s still a work in progress, but then of course, everything is.

September 12, 2011 / 7 Comments

Am I failing at social media?

(Image credit: docpopular)

When I first got started with Twitter, I set up a filter so that whenever I got a notification from Twitter that someone followed me, it was sent to a special folder in my Gmail inbox.

That folder now has 9581 emails in it. So 9581 times, I’ve gotten a notification that I was just followed by someone. There are a couple of people that follow and unfollow me repeatedly, trying to get me to follow them (while never engaging in me in dialog at all, I might add), but almost all of those notification emails are from new people.

However, I don’t have 9500 followers, I actually have about 6600 followers.

Some quick subtraction shows that of the 9500 or so people that followed me at some stage during the past three years, nearly 3000 of them have unfollowed me. To put it another way, nearly a third of the people who follow me eventually unfollow me. Are these 3000 lost opportunities to connect with people?

Why do these people unfollow me?

My friend told me that she unfollowed me because I was tweeting too much and overwhelming everyone else in her network.
Some of the "people" who unfollowed me were actually spam bots and eventually got blocked by Twitter.
Some of them unfollow me because the information I post doesn’t meet their needs.

The key thing is, most of the people who unfollowed me because of their needs, not because of what I’m doing or not doing. It’s easy to take being unfollowed or blocked personally, but I really try hard not to. After all, the whole point of a personal learning network is that it is personal, and that you need to meet your needs.

September 12, 2011 / 0 Comments

What 9/11 means to me

Like most people, I will never forget where I was the morning of September 11th, 2001.

It was my second week of training to become a teacher, and I arrived early at the library to see everyone glued to the screen and watching CNN. As I walked into the library, the second plane crashed into the tower. It was a difficult day for all of us, and we knew that our day was nothing compared to the poor people in the tower. I remember people crying, and all of us felt numb.

A year later, I was in NYC teaching in Brooklyn, and the school year had just started. The first anniversary of 9/11 came up, and I realized that my students had all lived through the experience in a much more personal way than I had. We talked about it. We shared stories. It was the most intimate day of the year for us, and one of the only days that my students were quiet and contemplative.

Over the years, I grew concerned as I watched our liberties erode and the culture of surveillance grow. Boarding a flight turned from being something enjoyable, sometimes even exciting, to something I dreaded. When I learned about the Patriot Act, and all that it entailed, and how it even affected me as a Canadian living in England, I became worried. How could we let one act of violence change our world so much? No one who is content with their life resorts to violence to communicate.

In 2006, on the 5 year anniversary of 9/11, everything changed, at least for my wife and I. Our son was born at 4:03pm. 9/11 changed for us forever, from being a day we mourn, to a day we celebrate. While I will not forget the events that happened on that fateful day, the joy of the birth of my son outweighs all of the negative emotions I have attached to 9/11.

Our son knows nothing about 9/11. He is too young. His life is filled with playing and learning about the universe through the lens of a small child. He does not need to know about the ugliness of the world yet.

In the birth of my son, I learned that even a day of great destruction can become one of hope. Through my son’s eyes, I am reminded that the world is full of wondrous things. I see hope for our future in him, and other children like him who were born into the post-9/11 world.

Each year that we celebrate our son’s birth, I am reminded again that we have not lost celebrations and other reasons for living. I am reminded that our lives should be about building communities and families. I am reminded again of why I want to raise my son to be a good person, a critical thinker, and someone not bound by prejudice. I am reminded that on a day of great trajedy and sorrow, I received the greatest gift of my life.

September 6, 2011 / 0 Comments

Global #edchat tweetup

Here’s the basic idea, which someone (and who that someone is, I’ve forgotten) suggested on Twitter; we should all host local #edchat tweetups, ideally at about the same time. ~~One suggested time period would be during the~~ ~~GlobalEd conference~~ ( dates suggested by @iEARNUSA ) which would mean the tweetups would be scheduled during the week of November 14th through the 18th. These are not the firm dates though as I do not want to interfere in anyway with the GlobalEd conference. It might be better to host these in the week prior to this for example… See below.

Each local organizer will fill out the form linked below and indicate the date, time, local venue, and geographic location of their tweetup. The local organizer would be responsible for advertising to their local Twitter community, and for keeping some sort of record of the #edchat tweetup. This would encourage more of our network of teachers on Twitter to meet each other. I will also take the information from the form and turn it into a Google map of all of the various tweetups occurring.

As an organizer, you could also:

invite your colleagues who are not yet on Twitter to join you.
invite your colleagues to register for the Global Ed conference.
decide on a topic for your local group, or choose a topic from a previous #edchat discussion.

Submit the details of your tweetup here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFp1anNxc3RnQkFPZ1NnUXJIN0NRUnc6MQ

Update: It looks like it will be too much of a conflict with November 14th through 18th and the Global Ed conference, so I’m moving the dates of the Tweetups to the week of November 21st through November 25th.

September 5, 2011 / 1 Comment

Questions about Edcamp & professional development

If you’ve not heard about Edcamp, I recommend first reading this blog post by Mary Beth Hertz on what Edcamp is. I absolutely think that educator centred professional development, like the Edcamp model, is a necessary part of our future professional practice.

The descriptions of edcamps, according to the foundation statement of the Edcamp foundation is:

free
non-commercial and with a vendor-free presence
hosted by any organization interested in furthering the edcamp mission
made up of sessions that are determined on the day of the event
events where anyone who attends can be a presenter
reliant on the “law of two feet” that encourages participants to find a session that meets their needs

These are all great attributes of the Edcamp model, but I have some questions, and wonder if we can push the Edcamp model to be a more robust replacement for traditional professional development.

How can we encourage follow-up and continued conversations after the Edcamp conference day? One common complaint of traditional professional development is that it’s like a drive-through at a fast food restaurant. It tastes great, fills you up, but leaves you hungry for more in a few hours. Traditional one-off professional development is equally ineffective, except when it inspires educators, and makes them want more.
The traditional presentation style of workshops is itself problematic. How can the edcamp model support a more learner centred model? In a traditional professional development model, the learner is expected to sit and passively absorb knowledge from the presenter, and while the edcamp model addresses this to some degree (in their "law of two feet" & Twitter backchannel chats), under the existing guidelines, an Edcamp could end up looking very much like a more traditional conference. At Edcamp Vancouver, we at least partially addressed this last April by forcing presentations to be limited in length, and opening up more time for a discussion about the presentation.
How do we address feedback to the learner in the Edcamp model? In the learning process, getting feedback about your own perspective is critical. Discussions are one way to get feedback, but not everyone is comfortable jumping into discussions, but every learner requires some feedback on their learning.

The Edcamp planning commitee for Edcamp Vancouver will be meeting in a couple of weeks, and I plan on bringing these questions to them. If you have suggestions on how we can address these questions using the Edcamp model, I’d love to hear them.

September 4, 2011 / 6 Comments

New York Times article misses the point

Matt Richtel, of the New York Times, has recently written a piece on the use of technology in schools which should be read carefully. He writes:

Since 2005, scores in reading and math have stagnated in Kyrene [emphasis mine], even as statewide scores have risen.

To be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

This conundrum calls into question one of the most significant contemporary educational movements. Advocates for giving schools a major technological upgrade — which include powerful educators, Silicon Valley titans and White House appointees — say digital devices let students learn at their own pace, teach skills needed in a modern economy and hold the attention of a generation weaned on gadgets.

He has assumed that the purpose of education is to improve test scores, or at the very least that these are a good measure of learning. He has also generalized about the use of technology in classrooms across the US from two examples; a single school district, and the state of Maine. He is right that many schools are spending money unwisely on unproven technologies, and have not put into place practices to either support these technologies, or examine their effectiveness.

Aviva Dunsiger has written a response to this article based on the results of a direct reading assessment (DRA) she’s done during the course of the year. She doesn’t attribute the phenomenal gains on the DRAs to the use of technology in her classroom, she attributes it to the change in her teaching practices that resulted from the technology being available in her classroom.

This is my reason for promoting the use of technologies in schools. The introduction of computers in the classroom has the ability to be a disruptive force, and transform the pedagogy that is used in the classroom. This doesn’t mean that it will transform pedagogy, it just has the possibility to do so. In 50 years of attempts to change the classroom, nothing has come as close as this current driving force from technology.

In 1993, Seymour Papert wrote,

"Video games teach children what computers are beginning to teach adults–that some forms of learning are fast-paced, immensely compelling, and rewarding. The fact that they are enormously demanding of one’s time and require new ways of thinking remains a small price to pay (and is perhaps even an advantage) to be vaulted into the future. Not surprisingly, by comparison School strikes many young people as slow, boring, and frankly out of touch."

While it is possible to teach in ways which are compelling and rewarding, many schools do not do so. Technology in the classroom can be a lever through which we effect real change in our schools in a positive and fundamental way.

September 4, 2011 / 2 Comments

Fixing Math Education

I’m in the middle of researching different proposed solutions to "fix math education." I’ve started classifying these proposed solutions and am hoping I can get some help to look for more possible solutions, and to flesh out the arguments supporting each of these various solutions. I’ve also added some resources into this document (like videos & essays about math education) and would love it if people could add more videos in particular as well as pivotal essays discussing math education.

Access & edit this document here.

I’ve embedded the document below if you’d like to read it without editing it. Please feel free to add comments to the document if you don’t feel comfortable editing it.