Producing quality work or just a new way to do old things

I have been using a blog and a wiki in my classrooms for a little over 2 months. Our district recently had Will Richardson come and speak to us about social networking and using web tools in the classroom. I can't quite get my students excited about producing their own content on the web. I talk about global audiences and them taking ownership of their learning but it seems to them like just another task, like doing homework. How can we make mathematics come alive for these students? I love exploring the new tools like skype and jing. I can't wait for the day when that great idea comes to me and I have students collaborting with other students across the country or the world on something. If there are any ideas about projects or activities I could have my senior algebra/trig students or my integrated math 1 students try I would love to hear from you.

Tags: collaboration, math, project

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Permalink Reply by Kristen Fouss on February 4, 2008 at 5:59pm

Hey Darin -

Do your kids realize that their work is out there for anyone to see? I added that map to our class wiki page (like I saw on yours) and my students were amazed that there were actually people looking at what they've created! I'm pondering a follow-up assignment for them to edit and refine their pages; I had them evaluate 5 - 10 of their classmates' pages and I typed up their comments for feedback.

So, I don't know how to help you make the math "come alive"... but if you find the secret, let me know!

Kristen

Permalink Reply by Alessandro Allegri on March 22, 2008 at 4:54pm

Hi Darin.
How have you been using wikis and blogs?
I feel that there is great potential in these things but I need to see examples, can't figure out how I might experiment yet.
As for the maths "alive", I don't really know. I saw the situation slightly improve whenever I tried to walk out of the beaten track. That is, I noticed that my students like philosophy, humanities, literature, so I tried to show them the historical aspects of maths, errors and trials, how wrong is to believe that maths are born perfect, or have grown up perfectly. This helped a little, as I said. This is why when I found the post about Mnemograph I got curious, because that could be an intersection between technologies that actually help learning and a way of conceiving mathematics that students find more appealing.
This said, the task of making "the math come alive" looks quite huge to me... A wiggling toe is what I hope :-)

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