As an AMSTI math specialist, we are constantly trying to bridge the gap between instruction and 21st century learning. Many teachers participate in blogs, pod-casting and other Web 2.o tools, but don't utilize them during instruction.
As the Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative continues to grow throughout the state, making the shift from traditional teaching, to a more hands-on curriculum and communicating this change is vital to to the success of the program. Our job as specialist is to educate teachers, students, and most importantly parents. Typically, parents and teachers may refer to this as "fuzzy math" or "weird math". Some will claim they learned fine, so why the change?
As Alabama moves toward the Common Core State Standards, the traditional approach is not enough. In order to prepare students to be college and career ready, schools need to move away from the teacher directed classroom, to a more teacher facilitated environment. Classrooms need to be a place where students problem solve, work cooperatively, and reflect on learning.
A classroom that shares and collaborates their learning by using Web 2.0 tools, can give an accurate snapshot into mathematics instruction that offers purposeful and intentional learning for students.
Blogs in Education discusses the importance of the linking others into learning and how it can benefit classrooms.
A great way to use blogs in the classroom, can be through Number Talks. Allowing students to solve problems and share their thinking and strategies gives them an audience and others insight on student thinking. Recording students solve problems and allowing them to collaborate together gives students the opportunities to work together and share their knowledge.
By communicating student thinking to parents, if allows insight into the benefit of collaborative tools and problem solving with a variety of strategies. Blogging in the elementary classrooms has many benefits. It allows students to communicate thinking and collaborate with various strategies to solve problems. It offers parents and teachers the ability to actually see students making connections with number and the positive impact it has on student learning. Furthermore, if parents are educated on the conceptual approach, they are less likely to make inaccurate assumptions on what is happening in today's classroom.
I would be interested to hear how you feel about the flipped classroom model. With math, it would seem that having the teacher there to help with solving problems would be beneficial. I think that for math, the CC standards for reading and writing are going to be the most difficult to implement, as reading and writing are not typically associated with the subject. However, students talking or writing about the "whys" helps them to undertand the concepts at a deeper level. It is such a big change from when we were taught!
ReplyDeleteCommunication is one of the major issues that we deal with at my school. Many teachers have blogs, websites or Edmodo, but parents and students are not using these as we hoped. I am not sure if it is because it is a high school setting and parents are not as involved or because of the socioeconomic situations of many of our students. This is an area that we will be working on.... technology and communication.
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