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Tag: math

Number Talks

number talks

Our incredible math coordinator, Genta Branstetter, shares how to do number talks in the following video.

Number Talks

Math Education, Technology and Journalism

Slate blogger Konstantin Kakaes dives into math education, offering his insights on how technology, especially calculators, interferes instead of promotes learning in math classes. Kakaes interviews Vern Williams, who teaches in Fairfax County, where my sons attend Marshall High School.

The editors of Slate then brought in a master math teacher to respond to Kakaes’ post, followed by a response from Kakaes. I share these posts as well worth a read to further one’s understanding of math education and demonstrate how difficult it is for journalists to cover education, especially when the topics are very complicated. It is important to note that the editors and writers at Slate are working to cover education with some depth, so do look for other articles and additional discussions from the commentators.

I continue to look for resources to help me understand what makes for effective math instruction. How can we better design math curricula while supporting our math teachers and students in how they use technology? Sylvia Martinez’s posts on Khan Academy helped me build my understanding as I questioned the flipped model for math, which emphasizes direct instruction via teacher-created videos. Hopefully, the daily follow-up classroom discussions and collaboration will be more concept and constructivist-focused, building on the lessons the students viewed the previous evening. But as Mark Hofer mentioned, this is all predicated on students doing their homework. 🙂

On a personal note, I am frustrated to read that the Fairfax County school where Mr. William works is spending funds to put interactive whiteboards (IWB) in each classroom. The lesson learned from the past decade of spending massively on IWB is that there are much more effective ways to spend school technology budgets. Thankfully, the principal of Marshall High School shared with me that the massive renovation of the school right now will not include any funds being spent on IWBs.

As an educator and taxpayer, I hope that the educational leaders of Fairfax County follow the example set at Marshall High School as they renovate schools each year. Thomas Jefferson High School, where my wife works, is up next for renovation. It will be interesting to see what decisions the principal and school board will make in technology spending for that project. They will likely engage their teachers, librarians, instructional technologists, and students to make intelligent decisions that support student-centered classrooms and collaborative learning.

 

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Khan Academy: Student Feedback

Our 5th graders are piloting the use of Khan Academy as a supplement to their regular math lessons. All the Middle School students will have accounts next year.

The students were given time to explore to get a feel for the site. It was up to them to seek tutorials on math lessons they were studying. We will see next year if the 6th through 8th-grade math teachers assign specific video tutorials for the students to review to support the classroom lessons. There is no discussion of teachers trying to use the videos in a flipping manner. Next year, it will also be interesting to see if the students continue becoming independent and active learners who further build out their personal learning systems to include a resource like Khan Academy.

I asked the 5th-grade math teacher if she would like to do a quick survey of her students to get a feel for their experience logging in with our school Khan account and their responses to the following questions. They used the forum tool in Haiku to answer the questions.

1. Is it easy to get on Khan Academy and navigate around the site?
2. Which do you find more valuable as a student- the videos or the practice questions? Why?
3. How has this changed or improved your learning in math?
4. Do you Khan Academy at home? Why or why not?
5. Any other helpful comments about this site (all Middle School plans to use it next year, so as the pilot group, any thoughts or suggestions are helpful).
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Here are some of the student responses:

-I think that it is very easy to go around the site learning stuff that you want to learn. You just type up the topic that you want to learn, and you’ll probably find it. I think that both the videos and the practice are both very useful. The videos help you learn things that you want to learn, and the practice questions help improve your skills in that topic. I think that it has helped me a little bit because most of the stuff I do, I already know. I think that I should start doing topics that I haven’t learned yet. I do not use it at home because I usually don’t have the time to. I also kind of feel that I don’t need to. My favorite videos are the doodling in math class videos. The badges don’t really motivate me. What I’m really trying to say is that I don’t really mind about them. The thing that really motivates me is trying to master all of the skills.
-I like Khan Academy a lot because it is very organized, and I learn a lot from it. It is also good that it has suggestions for things that you should do by the videos that you watched. It is easy to navigate around the site, especially finding videos with the search button. I think both are very useful, but I guess the videos are more important because they teach you what to do instead of making sure that you understand the video. I think it has improved my learning in math by showing me what to do and then testing me on what I’ve learned. It also shows me what to do one by one with suggestions and lets me know if I should keep practicing with the star things. I don’t really go to Khan Academy at home because I do not know how to make my own file or get on it, and mostly because I’m pretty busy. I really like Khan Academy, and I think it’s really helpful because I am not only improving in what I do in school but also learning new things.
-I think that getting to the site and navigating was very easy for me. The questions were better because they gave you practice on various math subjects. They also have questions for every kind of math subjects. My learning is the same, but this website has given me great practice on math subjects. I haven’t because I haven’t been able to get to it because of other home work that are due the next day. I do recommend using it at home, though. I think that everything is very good and will be excellent for next year’s middle school.
-It is easy to go to Khan Academy, but it is hard to navigate through the site and find the videos. I think that is because there are so many videos that it is hard to find the video you are looking for. As a student, I would mostly rely on the practice videos. I rely on the practice videos because they teach you about the subject very clearly. I do not use Khan Academy at home because I do not have time to watch videos and do problems. I think that Khan Academy is very helpful and useful. It goes over many things that many people get puzzled about. If I will get stuck on a subject, I would definitely go to Khan Academy.
-It is really easy to get to Khan Academy and find what videos you want to watch. I guess the practice questions are more helpful than the videos. Although, the Fibonacci videos are very helpful for doodling! For the regular videos, I find it hard to listen to the guy. I don’t think this has helped or improved. It might help if I watch some harder videos… I watch the doodling videos sometimes at home because it shows you how to draw really easy, cool stuff. I think if we use it next year, the Fibonacci videos might be good for an abstract art unit.

 

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Testament to the Need for Shifted Teaching & Learning

A freshman at Georgetown University wrote an article this past weekend describing how his K-12 education could have prepared him for the concept-based, higher-level thinking and transference of learning that his professors expect of him. The student, Darryl Robinson, described how he learned to be very successful during his K-12 years by memorizing the teacher-delivered knowledge level content to give it back on the assessments.

Looking at the article online today, there are 530 comments. Many congratulate Mr. Robinson for his courage in sharing his experience. Others point to the weakness of DC public schools. Others question the nature of our standards-based curricula that aim so low on Bloom’s Taxonomy. The central theme is the usual “why cannot we do a better job in our schools?”

One way to get folks thinking about improving schools, specifically in making math instruction more engaging and constructivist, is to listen to a recent Edreach podcast interview with Sylvia Martinez of GenYES. The discussion starts with the flipped classroom mania and expands from there.

A second connection to shifting our schools away from Mr. Robinson’s type of “schooling” experience is Sylvia’s series of posts on math education. Sylvia offers several excellent ideas.

 

A Math Educator Connecting the Dots of Data

I read a Washington Post article entitled “Energy official sees climate ‘catastrophe'” this afternoon. The chief economist for the International Energy Agency said on Monday that we are headed to a 6-degree Celsius increase in temperature by 2100 due to forecasts of increased worldwide energy consumption. As a believer in the science and research that human activities are increasing the temperature of our planet, I wondered what the math was that led to this conclusion.

It then so happened that I turned to my RSS reader and found Patrick Truchon’s latest post, which explained the math behind forecasts about the high-speed growth of atmospheric CO2, which is leading to the expected increase in the temperature of the Earth. As I work to teach my students to employ various literacies when they gather and analyze information, it was neat to see a teacher demonstrating how to pull the data and use math to come to his conclusions. Bravo Patrick.

I can see how science, math, and social studies teachers could collaborate to develop a unit of study on global warming connected to the current Republican presidential nomination process. With several of the nominees denying that human activity is affecting the planet’s temperature, students could be challenged to take a stand on the issue while using research from current global warming studies, the science method, and math problem-solving to back their position. An additional area focusing on social studies and current events could be to have the students research and explain the factors that led the Canadian government to announce that they would not agree to a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol.

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