Ken Meredith recently wrote a post highlighting what Dean Shareski mentioned in his presentation to our ECI 831 class about early adoption of technology — namely, that educational value may not be easy to spot right away, and that simply playing with technology is quite alright (and often leads to great ideas of how to use it to achieve curricular objectives).
While I completely agree with this idea, I think it’s equally important to give our students the same freedom. I try to build explicit play (about 20-30 minutes per week) into the courses that I teach. Now, I can’t always fit it in, and sometimes it takes longer than I anticipated, but it sure makes kids look forward to coming to my classes.
In my math classes, some things that we’ve done are Fun Fridays (in which I play a random YouTube video at the end of class on a Friday), encoding and decoding secret messages (in which I tend to go off on a short history of cryptography and it’s many uses), playing games on the SmartBoard (everything from Countdown, a distinctly math-ee game, to Yellow Out, a parking lot logic game) and anything else that strikes my fancy that week.
In my computer science classes, there’s a lot more flexibility, since all of the students are on computers hooked up to the net. In general, I try to show them (and give them time to play around with) at least one new tool/website each week. The sky is the limit here, and I don’t really have any particular category that the site has to fall into, so long as I think it’s neat, I show it.
Now, I know that I am not the first to use play in my math classroom. However, it’s hard to not feel guilty on occasion when a fellow teacher is walking down the hall and we’re (gasp!) having a great time in my math class… just playing around.
So, I’m curious. How do you incorporate play/games in your classroom?
Whenever I can make it work, I like to give my students one class period to review prior to an exam. As we have an exam on factoring tomorrow, my Math 20 students were working on a review today. Inspired by some of the discussions around connectivism and collaboration I have been around lately, I decided to do a bit of small scale social learning (just within my own classroom walls).
I gave my students their review handout, as per usual. They had the first 5 minutes of the class to get themselves going on the review, after which I would randomly call a student to come and do the question on the SmartBoard. These were all recorded using Jing, and then tossed up to the course wiki. The compilation of questions is here.
The reaction of the students was quite something. I had already modeled how to record examples for the wiki in previous classes, so they already knew how it worked. It was just a matter of taking some time in class to let them go at it. Some students were instantly excited, and wanted to record as many questions as possible. All of the students enjoyed the fact that they had time to work through the question on their own first, and then record how they did the question. A number of the students were nervous about making a mistake on the recording, and therefore would ask their neighbor/me whether they had done it right prior to recording. One student was so paralyzed by fear of making a mistake that she asked me quietly if I would not call on her (this was a student with a fairly high average — 75%+).
Speaking of mistakes, I don’t know how to best record examples of them. I don’t want the student to feel belittled by posting something incorrect and labeling it as such, but there seems to be so much potential learning in taking a mistake and discovering how it can be fixed. This is easily done in class, but really hard to show on Jing (of particular difficulty is the 5 minute time limit, which doesn’t allow too much exploration of “what went wrong”). Any ideas?
In the end, this wasn’t too much different than the normal review period. However, I certainly saw a drastic increase in student engagement, and a bunch of students left talking about how they would be watching themselves/each other online tonight. Really, if I’m getting them to voluntarily watch math videos, I’ve got to think something’s going right!
So, one thing that I do at the start of a new semester is get students to give me their contact information (that sounds too grandiose, it’s really just their name and email address). A few years ago, I wrote a PHP script to do this for me, though hosting a PHP script for this is overkill for most people.
Google recently extended their Docs capabilities to allow for easy form sharing/info grabbing. I just tested it, and it honestly took me less than 2 minutes to create a simple form and start getting information in it. Wow. According to Google:
Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet automatically. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet.
I created a short screencast that goes through the process of creating the form and populating it with an initial bit of data.
(Via Daring Fireball)
