Chris Dede just played this video in his early-bird seminar here at Innovative Learning without apparent irony:
I mean did anybody see The Devil Wears Prada?! Anne Hathaway went insane from the non-stop multi-tasking. Is it too much to ask for a little restraint even as we prepare our students to compete with the Chinese / Indian economic menace, etc.? Where’s Dina.
In an astonishingly wise appropriation of tech funds, my district is paying its own teachers to conduct tech seminars for other teachers. I signed up for a block of three tutorials on maximizing digital projector use in the classroom. I have way too much material for this workshop.
But my district’s curriculum coordinator assigned me a workshop called “Web 2.0 for Mathematics Instruction” unaware that my c.v. here is positively larded with skepticism about this place where your Internets and my Maths coincide, a place which you have sworn exists. I have no material for this workshop.
Neither, apparently, do the ed-tech institutions. Vicki Davis retweeted this from Dianne Krause the other day:
Leigh Ann Sudol’s response, that this blog represents some kind of coincidence of Web 2.0 and math, is even more disconcerting:
Far from representing the read-write web’s effect on math instruction, this blog remains perpetually befuddled by it.
So before I cancel this workshop (for which I never volunteered in the first place) I’ll put Vicki and Dianne’s question out here: does anybody have any examples of Web 2.0 technology transforming math instruction?
I’m particularly interested in methods specific to math. Tell me my students can collaborate over a conceptual wiki, or Skype with another country over project-based learning, or blog their class notes, and you’ll find my attention wandering. These techniques could enhance a class on auto repair, I realize, but the farther you wander away from the liberal arts towards my room, the more their returns diminish.
Postscript:
Though Scott has yet to release his 2008 survey of the edublogosphere (which *cough* will only be a year outdated this January) I have seen some of the early infographs and they confirm that the loudest voices on the matter of ed-tech don’t teach and, furthermore, don’t teach math:
Time was, I’d recommend Darren Kuropatwa as the go-to guy for math instruction using read-write technology but I pay my taxes more often than he blogs.
So where are the Web 2.0-enabled math teacher bloggers?
There’s nothing in this world more fun to teach than proportional reasoning. I mean, if you can’t make magic out of proportions, check yourself into math teacher rehab or something, ’cause you’re missing the view.
Two things:
Download high quality here. See the pilot for instructions.
The math here is fairly self-evident (I think) but I’m really curious how you’d deploy this in the classroom. Be specific.
BTW: Mr. Follett โ concise and correct:
(1) Play clip.
(2) Pass out the photograph, Iโd get this by doing a screen grab.
(3) Make other materials available: dollar bills, rulers
(4) Make this info available.
(5) Ask them the shoe size.
(6) Discuss, reflect, justify.
This is, more or less, exactly how it went in Algebra for us this week. Here is the relevant frame grab formatted as a 4×6 frame as well as the follow-up scene from the movie itself.
BTW: The application RulerPhone ties into this nicely. More here.
BTW: A much better hook from an audience member at my UC Berkeley presentation than the one I originally concocted: “Which of your classmates could be the killer?”
