Thanks for a great blog!

As for the “cost” vis a vis access to computers and the internet at home, I teach in an urban inner city school. Almost all kids have computers at home but there are always those that don’t. So, as a public school, it is our responsibility to provide equal opportunity at school for all students to achieve and get the same quality of education. I’ve often had students use my classroom computer to do their assignments and they use the school computers in the library or computer labs. It’s doable. Very doable.

From what I’ve seen happening in my school, and what I’ve been doing with my students for several years now, the concerns you raise here haven’t materialized.

Frame your talk along the lines of what doesn’t work for you (wikis, twitter, whatever) and then what does work – teacher collaboration.

After all, isn’t the biggest problem TEACHER ignorance of technology?

I spent this summer reading the archives of your blog and about 10 other math ed blogs, and the posts and discussions (especially discussions) helped me so much to prepare for this first year. They made me think about professionalism, ethics, things to try and not to try, comfort that other people have the same problems and fears, ideas for activities and worksheets that I modified, etc.

If you teach these teachers about a couple of web applications, they will go home and AT MOST use those 2 applications in the next year.

If you teach these teachers about the edublogosphere, they can go home and just start reading blogs. Its far less intimidating than trying something new in your class, and slowly they can learn a million new things and incorporate them at their own pace and with their own judgement.

Tell them about your blog and others you respect and find valuable. Show them some of the best things you’ve found on the web. Then show them that you have made a post on your blog with links to your recommendations so that during a spare 10 minutes they can go to that post and start clicking around and talking to other teachers about pedagogy.

You can use this opportunity to connect them to thoughtful education blogs and forums, whereas someone else might use it to teach them about This Cool New Thing Called Wikis. Please reconsider canceling.

There is great education research that shows students learn complex thinking skills and challenging topics best by practice and teaching the topics to others. What about creating a homework help site? Students asking questions are not allowed to post the exact problem from the homework – must change the numbers around, and helpers are not allowed to give the solution but only next steps in the process.

The rules of interaction here will define this a particularly suited for math.