Playing update

Since my previous post regarding the importance of students playing in class, I’ve become ever more conscious of making sure that I really do spend time allowing this to happen.  As much as possible, I try to work from what they are already interested in.

This past week, a number of my computer science students (geeks in the most positive sense of the word) were telling me about a riddle they had been playing.  It’s called Neutral Riddle, and starts off simply enough, only to become devilishly difficult.  The goal is to finish all 71 levels by guessing the URL that contains the next clue.  These kids are spending hours each night trying to get to the next level.  (Warning: If you are a compulsive problem solver, be aware that this could engulf your time.  Only 70-ish people in the world have solved this riddle, none of whom are from Canada.  One of my students is currently at level 38.)

Today in CS class, we worked on the first 2 of levels in the Neutral Riddle together (for about 5-10 minutes).  Then, after they had all figured out the concept of the thing and were addicted (to varying degrees), I suggested we make our own.  So, today’s class was spent with each student creating one level of the riddle that we will collaborate on.  I got them going by showing them how to find images using flickrCC (making sure they follow the Attribution CC license) and getting them talking to each other about ideas of what their riddle might involve.

This fit in perfectly with what we had been doing.  I just finished up teaching a unit on XHTML/CSS (markup languages for the web), and this gives me a great opportunity to stretch out their learning on these topics. Now, as they are having fun creating this riddle, they are also reinforcing their knowledge of XHTML/CSS.  Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll be able to provide a link to the start page for our riddle (we didn’t quite get to that today).

As an aside, I also had fun with my Math C30 students today.  We played a game with trig functions (taken from the Mathematics Teacher, but I forget the author).  Seriously.  Just get them into pairs, then see who can get the answers in the time limit, using only their brains and a pencil.  They actually really got into it, so I had them create their own variations after we were done.  I’ve posted a template up on Google Docs, and the students are going to add in their variations online tomorrow, so I can use them for future classes.

Teaching students that it’s okay to play

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? 

Most enjoyable in-class review session I’ve had

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!

Easiest. Forms. Ever.

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)

Major digital project for ECI831

I’ve been thinking that I’d like to continue to work on my math wiki as my major digital project.  I created this wiki primarily to give myself a place to organize the Jing screencasts I was taking of concepts I was teaching in my math clasees.  Although I started this wiki a month before class began, I’d really like to spend some more time working on it, and I think that this course may be just the excuse that I needed.  The eventual goal (not by the end of ECI 831, but eventually) is to have instruction on 75% or more of the high school math content in SK available on the wiki, though the resource will continue to grow the longer I teach (I hope!).

Some ideas that I’ve had regarding how to extend it include tossing up my daily examples (course lecture notes) since I have them typed anyway, though I’m a bit concerned about copyright there, as I’ve borrowed liberally from some textbooks for those examples (a local SK one in particular).  Even throwing up a number of practice sets for students to have access to would be a start.

The one thing that I’m trying to sort out, especially in light of Rick Schwier’s presentation yesterday, is how I can get my math students to make meaningful contributions to this resource as well.  It’s a great way for me to organize learning resources for them, but I’d really like to delve into the social learning framework if possible.  I’m open to trying any ideas that you can come up with.

The wiki is at http://schellenbergmath.wikispaces.com
Please let me know what you think.

Edit: I should note as well that the way in which I’ve gotten students involved in creating the resource has been to  have them record answers to questions that another students have in their assignments.  Depending on the group of students, this has worked quite well.  You can find examples in the “Textbook questions” section of the wiki.

Article on multitasking

We all do it.  Whether or not we really want to, we get sucked into doing many things at the same time.  I’m listening to Yo-Yo Ma play Bach right now (c’mon, it’s been a long day!), which would sound much better if I gave it my full attention.  I just finished reading a great article called “The Autumn of the Multitaskers“, whose tag line is:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity.

I was thinking about this while blogging, twittering, surfing, and listening to Darren Kuropatwa last week.  Seriously.  And, if I do say so myself, I did a decent job of paying attention to all those things.  That is, as much as it humanly possible, which turns out to be not decent after all.  As much fun as it sometimes seems to mess about with so many things at once, I’m going to try out single-tasking for awhile.  I’ll let you know if there’s any difference.

Go read the article.  It’s worth your time.

Python IDLE location

This is a note for myself, for easy access the next time I want to do this:

When setting up some applications for my computer science class, I found that Python did not give me a nice shortcut to the IDLE built in (on Windows).  It provided a shortcut to PythonWinIDE, which is okay, but not really the editor I would prefer to use.  So, for future reference, to access the Python IDLE, just create a shortcut to the file:

C:\Python25\Lib\idlelib\idle.pyw

If you don’t have access to the C:\ (at school, perhaps…), just create a shortcut to any old thing, then change it to point to this location in the “Properties” tab.

Considering the choices I give students

While catching up on my reading, I stumbled upon this juicy tidbit (via Daring Fireball)

James Surowiecki, a few weeks ago in The New Yorker:

In an experiment in the early nineteen-nineties, people were first asked whether they preferred a $110 microwave oven made by Emerson or a $180 oven made by Panasonic. Only forty-three per cent chose the Panasonic. But when a higher-priced Panasonic model, costing $200, was introduced into the mix, people’s choices changed in a curious way: suddenly, sixty per cent wanted the $180 oven. Just adding a more expensive model made the medium-priced version look more attractive and boosted Panasonic’s total sales. Change what surrounds a product, in other words, and you can change what people think of it.

It immediately made me think of the choices I give my students.  What if I introduce my hypothetical “expensive model”, by giving them options that take a lot more work than is normally required?  Would I get a higher number of students willing to do what has now become the “mid-range” stuff?

Just curious.  I guess I’ll have to experiment.

My classroom technology failures and successes

So, here’s the dilemma: I would love to incorporate technology more effectively into my math classes, but I’m not sure it can be done. Before you scroll down to the comments to let me know I’m wrong, please sit through my thoughts below:

Truth be told, I’m a geek. I grok techie stuff, and it drives me nuts when it’s not used efficiently. I actually have to hold myself back when I watch someone attempt to search the web poorly. As in, typing in www.google.com into the location bar in their web browser and searching from there, rather than just using the Google search bar that sits one inch to the right of the location bar. You know, this one: (sorry, it’s too wide)

And don’t even get me started on not using the keyboard shortcuts to get there!

I realize this may sound like a completely ridiculous pet peeve. That’s because it is. However, I think it shows a bit of why I also find the indiscriminate use of technology “just because” to be quite frustrating. I once had a professor who said “Use the best technology available for the task at hand, whether that is a cursor or a pencil.” Sometimes, using technology can actually be detrimental to student learning, as opposed to helpful. Fellow math teacher Dan Meyer uses his important ratio number 1 to evaluate whether something is worth doing. Essentially, he divides the instructional value by the number of minutes something takes.

In my discipline of mathematics, I find myself continually running into a wall in terms of how I can incorporate non-pencil technology. Much as I would like to incorporate new technologies into what I’m doing, I find it often takes an inordinate amount of time, while achieving much the same student learning (or less) than when I do things the old traditional way.

The best example of something that didn’t work is when I tried using a class blog in math. This was a bad idea from the start, as I wasn’t completely sold on the idea, but desperately tried to make it work regardless (I had been provided a couple archaic laptops by my school division, so I had to do something with them!). We used the blog as a way for students to scribe what had gone on in class that day, as well as notify parents of assignments and exams. After about a month and a half of trying to make this work, it fell by the wayside. The students weren’t using it, and I had lost motivation to continue pestering them to put up their scribe posts. In the end, the attempt seemed mickey mouse — just attempting it because I thought I should. I think I have to side with Dan Meyer again, who essentially gives up on math blogs, despite others (such as Darren Kuropatwa) who manage to get mostly half-assed contributions from their students (no offense, Darren).

I should make the disclaimer that I have successfully used blogs (both a course blog and individual student blogs) in my computer science classes. It honestly is different. Part of it is access, part of it is not having to attempt to type mathematics, part of it is a more reasonable curriculum and part of it is that I can tie it into what I’m teaching by showing them how to program their own weblog from scratch.

Another thing I tried this year was to completely revamp the way that I taught grade 10 geometry. Thinking it would be great to have the students do some constructive learning through experimentation, I got myself hooked up with Geometer’s Sketchpad to use on my SmartBoard. I also got a copy of the Exploring Geometry textbook for use with the class. I spent an hour or so playing around with the software before getting the kids to use it, but essentially, I was learning it alongside them. The kids all cooperated really well — I would choose a student to be up at the board, and another who would talk them through the exploration (from the Exploring Geometry text). However, I found that quite often, the students were not understanding the significance of what they were doing with the software. I tried to give them leading questions, comments, etc. but it seemed that there was a disconnect between what they could understand on a regular white board and the SmartBoard. A couple of times, students returned to their comfort zone, quickly drawing something on the regular board to show me or another student what they were trying to convey. Some of this is certainly just their comfort level with the tool at hand, though it seemed to be more than just that. In my end of the semester survey, I had about 1/3 of the class who explicitly said they found the SmartBoard distracting (”harder to learn with” was the frequent quote), another 1/3 who didn’t mention the SmartBoard at all, and the final 1/3 who said it was great. I’m taking this to mean that I hit some people’s learning style with it, but that I should use it in moderation in future years.

The one resounding success I have had with using technology in my classroom is recording myself teaching basic math skills using Jing, then posting these to the web and organizing the clips in a wiki. This works wonderfully — my students love being able to go online to see and hear me going through a problem. This is particularly nice for the students who find math difficult, and just want to be able to hear something a number of times. We have also spent some time recording students at the board doing homework problems that others were struggling with. These are organized in a slightly different section in the wiki.

To sum up, I think what I am finding in my math classes is that there is room for technology, but that I am more comfortable with it than my students. Partly because I have a better theoretical grasp of technology than my students (most of them can just push the right buttons by trial and error — not a lot of true technological understanding), but also because I already know the math that they are trying to learn, they have a harder time not being distracted by the technology. One of my best students (95% in pre-calculus) told me this year that she had to make a conscious effort to stop thinking about how I was doing certain things on the SmartBoard, and instead think about how the math I was showing worked.

So, there’s my experience. What have you found? Any tips/advice for this math teacher who thinks he may have maxed out on his current tech integration?

Trying to be more social…

About a year and a half ago, I opted to quit blogging, and trimmed down my RSS subscriptions to be as few as I could.  The basic rationale was that I was trying to simplify my life as much as I could, and minimizing the time I spent online helped a lot.  However, I’m going to give it another go, though I’m going to keep a close watch on my time to keep myself sane (and married ;)  ).

So, after resisting for quite some time, I’ve finally joined Twitter. My username is danschellenberg, so let’s hook up and see how this twittering experiment goes…

Also, although I’ve been using Picasa as a web photo sharing site for awhile now, I’m going to be posting a few shots to flickr as well.  This is mostly so that I can be a part of the 366photos group,  as I’m making the mistake of letting others see my mediocre photos.  Ah well, you have to start somewhere…