Look Mom, no hands; Starting the Math Wiki without training wheels

There is a wiki part 1





So we've already started the math wikipage and without training wheels. The purpose of this blog is to act as counsel to anyone who wants to start a wiki page and a few things to look for. Since we're doing this without training wheels, I'm sure we'll find a lot of problems that will crop up and, of course, we're not sure about any success; we are making our best guess that, any work students will do on this math wiki, will be better than no work.

The goal we decided on was to take all of the Ohio math indicators for 7th grade and have students teach it the way they think it should be taught. We (Mrs. McMahon. and I) tried to set up some guidelines, requirements, and a sample page in the limited time we had to plan. We both have 6 classes of 7th graders and I, as the techie class teacher, have most of her math students.

Mrs. M. named the wiki and came up with the original description of the task at hand. I added my perspective on the project after reading Mrs. M's, and I added an mp3 and an embedded youtube video, so that the students could see the possibilities.

We knew that, because of scheduling and after-school conflicts, we really weren't going to have much more time to plan together. Since testing is coming up soon, we figured that any re-visiting of math indicators outside of math class would be better than no re-visiting, so we decided to just jump into the project and if a couple kids got something out of it we would be further ahead. We also believe that this project fits all of the ISTE standards as proposed in their Jan. 07 draft of technology standards.

So thus begins the project called:

A Student's Point of View: The Ohio Math Standards

I had already gotten the free educational wikispace from wikispaces.com and named the url for the page. During our techie classes, I did a random, visual survey, just to see if any of the students had done wiki pages before or knew what they were and, surprisingly, no one had. But, even more surprisingly, more than half of our students had myspace accounts.

While Mrs. M. was introducing the project in math classes, I began doing a similar intro in my classes, but, to be honest, my intro was more wiki and safety oriented than math oriented. I talked about a TV news investigator series about how a reporter found out addresses, sports, and other family activities, including dates and times, at a myspace account of a high school sophomore or junior. He met her at her house one day and told her so many things about her that she swore she never put on myspace. The reporter said that she didn't, but all her visitors did.

I think kids were surprised at the story, but, I'll have to do a questionaire at the end to see if my observation was accurate.

Then we jumped right into the assignment: Student chooses a math indicator (that the student doesn't know), learn everything about it, and teach it the way you think it should be taught. Luckily, everyone knew about the new TV show, "Are you smarter than a 5th grader", so it was easy to say that, from that show we've learned that parents aren't as smart as us so, we should teach the math concept as if we were trying to teach our parents. (I haven't heard the parental complaints, yet. I just hope there's a sense of humor out there.)

I told the students to check how well they teach the concept by asking their parents to read the wiki page and get their opinion. Hopefully, they do ask their parents because any affirmation they give to the importance of the assignment could increase engagement in the project.

A slight digression

Anything Schlechty that we can do we'll squeeze in. Our middle school went through Schlechty training back in the late 90's as part of our Schoolnet Raising the bar, 3 year project. Sometimes it's sad how some perfectly sound principles of education are abandoned because of a new fad that comes along, but that's for another blog entry.

So, here's my Schlechty checklist for the project

☛ Content and substance ( math indicators and iste indicators)
☛ Organization of knowledge (We are hoping that the modeling we've done, the guidelines, the demo of how to find keywords in the indicator and searching the web, and the pre-instruction on the indicators done in math class, will stimulate active participation, self-instruction, and, with the novelty/affirmation and other Schlechty elements of engaged learning, that the students will persevere until the task is complete.)
☛ Product focus ( meaningful to students, we hope that this is by virtue of "teaching each other the way you think it should be taught," that the world will access this wiki, tests coming up in May, and that each student will be visiting and learning from your page)
☛ Clear and compelling product standards (This is a weakness from not enough planning. We've given a demo of what it could look like and guidelines/checklist on what we would like to see in the presentation of the wikipage, but we need more. Us teachers needed to work through a concept together to be more specific on the final outcome. Maybe what we have is enough...)
☛ Protection from adverse consequences for initial failures (this is in the process. In other words, we need to visit pages on a consistent basis to make sure that the student is on a successful path. We are doing this, but, as the project moves on, we'll need to communicate to every student, which is difficult just like any assignment is difficult to give immediate feedback on. Hopefully the teachers will succeed).
☛ Affirmation of the significance of performance (we have had a couple visitors to our pages from outside our little world after only a day on the project. We'll try to get parents viewing the pages, also.)
☛ Affiliation (Students can work with partners)
☛ Novelty and variety(Students teaching the concept, use of wiki, podcasts, vodcasts and other audiovisuals)
☛ Choice (Students can work with partners, indicators chosen, how to teach the concept, audiovisuals used).
☛ Authenticity(Finding how the concept is used in real life, teaching others in school and all who access the wikipage.)

So following this post will be other postings on the progress of this project. I need to get this down now that I've got a spring break and can have some time to reflect on the start of the project. We've had a couple problems already, which I'll put in my next post.