In collaborative learning environments, how do we prevent students from transmitting misconceptions to each other? I like the idea of students seeing each other as resources, and using each other for support in developing their skills and knowledge. But it seems to happen all too often that a student believes they have a grasp of a concept and explains it to another student in a way that is not 100% accurate. How do we promote collaboration while ensuring that our students don’t practice errors?

This is one reason why a networked digital textbook sounds really exciting to me. I like the idea that a teacher could easily moderate what is posted, and respond to students who may have a misconception about something. All while students are able to share their work and see how their peers are thinking about the same mathematical concept.

All in all, I appreciate this post as well as the comments. We obviously need people like you thinking ahead about beneficial features educational products should strive for. At the same time, some of the comments here reaffirmed my own experiences, which is that teachers have a knack for maximizing what is currently available. When I first started at Time To Know, I was excited about our curriculum and digital teaching platform. However, when I actually started testing it out, I kept thinking about all the things our software *didn’t* do. I remember thinking to myself, “How in the world can a teacher use this and be happy?” While there were admittedly some frustrations, I spoke with teachers who didn’t see the glaring holes that I did. They saw potential and realized it on a daily basis. They had students whose favorite times of day were learning with our curriculum.

We should definitely continue to challenge companies to make better and better digital curriculum materials, but at the same time, I think it’s important to recognize and appreciate what benefits can be had with what is available today. Thanks again!

However, I get the impression that you focus heavily on the feature where students’ work is gathered together in one view, and that feature ends up being a (the?) benchmark of whether a product is “different enough”.

This essay considered digital curricula and networked curricula. Aggregating student work is one instantiation of one half of this essay, in other words.

… but how frequently do you expect it to be used? It sounds really useful where answers might have a lot of variability, such as spatial tasks like the time you posted a link where you asked people to estimate the midpoint of a line segment.

… and to aggregate guesses on every three-act task and for gathering student data for the sake of modeling and for any estimation task and for tasks where seeing lots of student-generated instances of a pattern helps students create conjectures and for letting students compare and contrast each others’ conjectures …

… and for all the other uses that would be awesome but which my brain is too small to think up right now.

But there seem to be lots of occasions where I wouldn’t necessarily want all of the student work superimposed on top of each other.

Is there a problem I’m missing with turning off that feature for those occasions? In my work with Desmos, we turned that feature on so we could see an overlay of every student’s model of the penny data and we turned it off when students were creating their own faces in Des-man. Because it would have been unwieldy.

But there seem to be lots of occasions where I wouldn’t necessarily want all of the student work superimposed on top of each other. If students were sharing calculations or figures they drew, it would be unwieldy to present all of them in one window. In that case I would want the work in some sort of collection where it could be opened one at a time, or maybe two side by side.

I’m not saying that the feature you’re advocating for shouldn’t be developed, but I’m not convinced it’s the must-have feature to define the next generation of digital products. Granted, I probably need to think more about use cases, but at this moment, it feels more like a niche tool that would only enhance certain lessons or units. Having a general feature that collects student work and allows the teacher or students to present it seems much more useful in a wider variety of situations.

I was thinking about an actual math “workspace”, where I can write an equation and show the step for solving it, all in the same workspace, and then share that with the teacher/other students.

The handwriting recognition is there, but not the step of implementing it into a full workspace.

The network ability of the technology is important as many have pointed out, as is the ability to automate tasks such as problem generation for practice, but a big gap still seems to be the utter “convenience” and simplicity of writing math on a piece of paper.

I think overcoming this obstacle is also an important step for the technology to fully mature for classroom use.

See http://davidwees.com/content/forget-future-heres-textbook-i-want-now

The fascinating thing for me is realizing that all of the capabilities that we might want in a textbook exist, each in separate forms, but no one has put it all together into one place yet.

Elizabeth’s point is very true, but it is also worth noting that vendors do not adopt a new technology because it is necessarily effective for teaching and learning; they adopt it because there is a profit margin for them. If we want to create something really valuable and lasting for student learning, we will probably have to do it ourselves.

The “innovators” adopt a technology because they need to be the first kids on their block to have whatever it is. The “early adopters” see strategic advantages and uses for it – and they are willing to put up with what they perceive as minor inconveniences like limited optimized uses in order to gain the advantages they seek.

That moment of “crossing the chasm” into the mainstream is that moment when a technology catches fire because vendors have figured out a way to reach beyond the techno-enthusiastic “early adopters” who have sustained their businesses to the techno-unimpressed “early majority” customers who are the major “show-me” skeptics. These skeptics form the first mass market for a technology, followed only later – and reluctantly – by a “late majority.”

Seems to me that we are still very much in an “early adopter” market in the race for digital textbooks. No one knows the “killer app” for digital curriculum is going to look like, but we do know it might bear some slight resemblance to the analog textbook. But this will not

As Steve Jobs always used to say, the “killer app” for the iPhone was making a phone call. But it was all the supporting infrastructure tht was built in (seamlessly integrated contacts, e-mail, texting, reminders, calendar, notes, & management of the technology) that transformed the act of making a phone call.

– Elizabeth (@cheesemonkeysf)