Improving with Web 2.0 Tools

This summer I created a Telecollaborative Design project called "Our Global Connections".  In this project, a website is created where classes can log in and participate in creating an informational database about themselves, including age, where they live, languages spoken/known, how many members in their families, and other facts.  The purpose of this project was to make students aware of their similarities across the globe rather than being upset by their differences.

Since editing would not be possible on this website, I would use a wiki to improve this project.  This would avoid users having to email me information or go through a website registration with information, as well as eliminate the delay in updating the website.  With the wiki, students could also individually access the page and update on their own.  The only possible downfall I can see to this is if students change other submissions, but I am hoping there will be teacher supervision to avoid this.  In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the costs, particularly with how much quicker the data will be updated!

Video Help

One of my favorite ways to introduce (or conclude) a topic is by watching videos posted by Westerville South High School (Columbus, OH) on youtube.  They have these fantastic music videos that they put together, taking popular songs such as "Teach Me How to Dougie" and change them into math such as "Teach Me How to Factor".  Although students are not becoming masters on the topics immediately from these videos, it certainly grabs their attention.
Aside from the entertainment value in videos, I also like to post video links on my Blackboard for students to watch as supplemental help.  There are a surprising amount of math videos that are lessons on specific topics, and the students really enjoy these.  They provide me with great feedback because students come in and share when they learn something, as well as when the video did not help and they recommend I never use that again.
The newest way I have used video in my classroom is to create a "flipped lesson" where I record myself talking and writing on the Smart Board so that students can watch and take notes at home the night before this topic is addressed in class.  I primarily created this because of the anticipation of a snow day, and it worked out well.  Our Algebra 2 team has done these for full units and has provided intense classroom structure to properly adjust to students who are at different learning levels.
As far as my students being the creators in the classroom, I have had some previous success with projects where Pre-Calculus students are given a variety of options, a video being one.  Last year, two students decided to make a lesson into a cooking show, and filmed that.  Two years ago, a group of boys created their own version of "Cash Cab" to demonstrate their knowledge of a topic.
While these were great, I did not have to actually teach the students anything on video editing.  As a matter of fact, a lot of my students are already incredibly talented with this in high school and are in other classes that teach them these skills.  Thinking about this as well as the lesson plan has made me realize that while there is always something to teach these students, perhaps I would have to structure the lesson differently than planned, to adjust to their previous knowledge.  Either way, my experience added to the student's experiences could make for some amazing math videos!

Online Resources in the Classroom

The past couple of weeks I have been pushing my students to try and "keep up" with snow days.  I told my Algebra 1 classes before the snow days that if we were to have school off, they should check Blackboard for their online assignment.  On the actual snow day, I communicated this via email, Blackboard announcement, posted a tweet on Twitter, and sent Remind101 texts, and still only 13/29 students completed the assignment in one class, with a similar number in the other.  I asked them to watch one video that I posted on Blackboard (roughly 4 minutes long) and complete a short 5-question homework assignment through Ecart (also on Blackboard), which they could take up to 3 times.  I was shocked that students claimed to still "not have known" about this, because I sincerely could not come up with any other ideas of how to communicate this.  I understand that Algebra 1 is not on every student's mind each snow day, but when you have hardly gone to school this winter, I thought it might cross their minds at least once.

I was and am appalled with this because these students are obsessed with their phones.  I really cause probably the worst part of their days when they have to surrender their devices to my "phone box", but how the heck do they (and we) expect student success if they clearly cannot figure out how to use this technology?  Don't get me wrong, a handful of students completed the assignment, but it just blows me away.

Each year, the students become more and more "attached" to their phones, and I am almost to the point where I can assume every student has one.  It's a wild thought to me, especially since I know they don't all have Internet, but I realized it when my homeless student had a better smart phone than I did this year.  To be quite honest, I don't know who or how this is being paid for, but if she has a phone, I feel like this is a fair assumption I can make.  This excites me a bit too, because I can really implement phone use outside of school into my lesson plans as long as I know students can receive my texts and access Blackboard somehow.

Social Networking: Educational?

We have all used social media at some point or another (even if it was just talking about it in a conversation) and can understand what a huge impact it has made on society today.  In my Algebra 1 classes, I have a "phone box" that students put their cell phones and iPods in at the beginning of each lesson and get them back at the end.  When they asked "Why?" (as if they didn't know), I explained that with 29 of them, plus 29 devices, I'm at a 48-1 battle that I will definitely not win.  None of the students ever argue to put their phones in because they know as well as I what a distraction it is.  Even if students try not to look at their phones, someone tagged them in a post or a picture or they just received a notification from some other social media application.  It is never ending!  I actually said to one student the other day that "the post will still be there after our lesson" and she said "it will, but it won't be relevant anymore after all that time!" and she was very serious.  She also had a point, that to this new generation of social networkers, there is an expiration on everything, and it is not a lot of time.  I recently acquired a Twitter account for school (@neuMATHster) and quickly realized that if students did not see my posts within ten minutes, it was likely they weren't going to see them ever.  How do they even keep up?!  To them, this is a way of life.  To me, this is just another chore to maintain, which is why I post about once per week.
Is it our responsibility to step in on the next generation's use of social networking?  I don't know.  I think it is important to set an example and to inform students of the potential issues that can come from social networking on all these different apps, but I honestly would not know where to start on teaching students to use these educationally.  On Twitter, teachers and I will re-tweet educational articles, and I post historically important mathematicians as my "Man Crush Monday" to entertain the students, but other than those brief things, I am still learning, and it seems to be much slower than the students.  To be honest, they could probably tell me what educational value social networking has more than I could tell them!