That's Mathematics

Part of any good teacher's strategy is motivating students by helping them understand the relevance of what they are learning. While legendary math professor and entertainer, Tom Lehrer could count on his musical talent to describe the value of mathematics, most of us have to come up with more varied engagement strategies. Part of the power of Web 2.0 applications is their ability to engage a participatory audience, thus why not capitalize on elements that make sites like YouTube popular amongst digital natives to increase participation in your classroom.

Creating a video podcast for math class can help your students correct misconceptions, learn the language of math, and clarify thinking about mathematical concepts. To see the refinement in thinking that occurred while these 6th grade students created a series of Math Strategies Podcast, their teacher examined the revision history of the scripts they edited on Google Docs. It was amazing how much ‘self learning’ occurred when students reviewed each newly produced version of their podcast episodes and self-corrected their scripts. The quality of the written process outlined in the final revisions of the scripts was many times higher than if the students had been asked to simply write out their math problem solving strategy. Although these students created each episodes using the “record” feature of a Smartboard, you can also use a variety of Screen Capture software such as the free version of Camstudio. A tablet PC or graphic tablet can also be used to capture inkstrokes making thinking visible. Some document cameras have video capture features, and there’s nothing wrong with using traditional video cameras, digital cameras, or even cell phones to create a video podcast of your mathematic strategies.

These video podcasts were created by St. Albans City School middle school teachers to help parents support their children's homework time by explaining the hows and whys of new math strategies. Uploading them to sites like YouTube, BlipTV, or Google Video allows you to hyperlink to your math podcast or even embed one directly into your own blog, wiki, or website. For those looking for a more controlled environment, consider TeacherTube or New Vista as an option for viewing and uploading video podcast. Even if you’re not ready to jump into producing your own math podcast a simple search for “math” on any of these sites will yield a wealth of videos ranging from academic tutorials to entertaining mathematics comedy to engage your students. (Warning: not all materials in these sites is suitable for educational use requiring some advanced planning on developing strategies that align with your school culture and acceptable use policies)

More data delight

The data delight continued for me this week as I explored more ITM readers’ suggestions for tools that can help students learn data-analysis, probability, and other important mathematics concepts.

Okay, the word ‘delight’ might not work if you’re not a ‘data enthusiast', but maybe you would be if more people followed the advice of Edward Tufte and mastered the skills to visually represent data. Watching Al Gore’s global warming presentation skills or Hans Rosling’s exciting Ted Talk makes it easy to understand why Visual Literacy has been identified as one of the key 21st century skills according to North Central Regional Educational Lab (NCREL) (Photo Credit)

"Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, use, appreciate, and create images and video using both conventional and 21st century media in ways that advance thinking, decision making, communication, and learning" ... NCREL

While I would never want to see the colorful crayons and markers that Ms. Patterson's students use to produce the graphs that line their classroom wall disappear, the next steps for preparing tomorrow’s leaders could be collaborating using online spreadsheets, publishing or embedding their graphs in a blog, wiki, or web page, and chatting from remote locations about their findings. The addition of graphing capabilities to Google spreadsheet provides an accessible tool for even our younger students to develop these 21st century skills.

Students can create an online graph in 3 simple steps.

(1) highlight data and click on the toolbar’s graph icon
(2) fill out a clean, user-friendly screen that even our younger students can understand (type of chart, labels, and whether you are charting columns or rows (both options --yeah!!)
(3) save and voila your graph appears on your spreadsheet.

Most teachers will easily see that the graph can be moved, edited, and saved as a separate image. If you want to share your charts with a global audience, click on PUBLISH tab, then scroll down to More Publishing Options. Selecting HTML as File Format will Generate a URL that you can paste as a hyperlink in emails or on a webpage. However, selecting the HTML to embed in a web page File Format and clicking Generate URL will actually give you some code that you can paste in a webpage, blog, or wiki. Don’t worry if you don't understand this code, just ask any student who has a MYSPACE account and they can show you exactly what to do with this code. Thank you JR for the tips on how to remove gridlines and the folks at Google for discovering that merged cells should be avoided on spreadsheets with published graphs (until this little 'bug' is fixed) as I added a Google chart to the jumping jacks data collected by by the students at St. Albans City School.

Go ahead, give it a try. Add a new twist to some of the classic Candy and Cereal graphing lessons using Web 2.0 tools to help today’s students meet important math standards. Imagine if the 2002 Skittles Project data had been collected and charted with Google Spreadsheet. (Photo Credit)

Thank you to all the ITM readers who shared their favorite tech tools for creating visual representation of data. Besides those I explored in my last post, readers have also suggested advanced tools (like www.data360.org and www.many-eyes.com) ; online productivity suites (like Zoho and ThinkFree); and online spreadsheets (like EditGrid and NumSum and more),

I can’t wait to hear how some of you are redesigning assignments with these tools.