Wiki's part 4: If it's wik-able can we get rid of the sticky wikit?

Wiki part 1
Wiki part 2
Wiki part 3



Our wiki math page has already begun. If you haven't read the first 3 postings on this topic, I've got links above.

What we are trying to do is take all 46 math indicators at the 7th grade level in our Ohio school and get the students to choose one and then try to teach themselves that one math indicator. Afterwards, our goal is to have each student visit every indicator before their May testing date and see if they can pick up a little extra math knowledge.

What does that mean for me, the techie guy who is the tech instructor in a lab setting where the math wikiwork is being done while the math teacher is far away in another room. To answer that question, you gotta know a couple things about me.

First, even though I'm the techie guy, I have a math certification and taught 6th and 7th grade math for several years before I got into the tech teaching side of the world. I also taught math part-time at Kent state for 7 years. I do have a math background, but I've been out of the business since we converted from Vic 20/Commodore 64's to our first Apple IIe days. In other words, I taught basic programming and math until the IIe's came in and then went full time computer ed. (I also have an masters in library science, but this is the math part of the story.)

I didn't care for math very much as a kid. By my senior year in high school, I had had enough of math and took a math class for students who never would do well in math. My guidance counselor suggested I major in math in college. I thought he was a crazy, old guy. (Sorry, Lou)

After being out of high school for 15 years, having a family, and losing my job as library/media specialist just because of seniority, I realized that math might be a worthwhile certification to get. I enrolled again at Kent State, atoned for my math sins by spending hours at the library while my poor wife suffered without help with the kids, and eventually gained the holy grail of ceritfications that eventually led me to teaching the dang subject; a subject that I learned to respect during this second go-around. (In the interim, I got my media job back...it's a long story.)

That's when I got my chance to teach math. I felt confident enough in math that, if someone threw problems at me and gave me a few minutes, I knew I would be able to solve a high percentage of them. If I was tired, or had a rough day for some reason, my percentage would drop. So, with total focus, I was pretty good. But, if tired...forget it. And with 3 young kids at home, coaching after school, and part time teaching, I had a lot of those tired days.

When I would prepare for a class, and it didn't matter if it was 6th grade or college I would start it a couple days before the class was supposed to be taught. I would try to go through every example, homework problem, and potential question that I thought might come up. Inevitably, though, during the lesson, someone would have a question that would pop up that I couldn't answer. Sometimes it was because of the way the question was asked to me other times was because I was having a brain flatulation at that moment.

As I look back on my past I would see myself as a slow learner who needed to have enough time to play with a concept before I could learn it. (I was so slow it would take me 3 minutes to play the minute waltz.) In high school, I felt like I could never keep up and, in math class, I hated the pressure of coming into school the next day and not really knowing the concept we learned the day before. I felt stupid.

Even with my slow rate of learning, though, if I learned something, I remembered it, or, at least I could work my way back to that learned, but forgotten, concept with some fundamental understanding of pre-concepts I could draw on and build to a repeat "Eureka" experience.

I always thought that the Eureka "learning a concept" experience was like a butterfly that would flutter toward me, land nearby for a moment where I could enjoy its beauty, suddenly flutter away for no reason, and land near you a second time for a brief moment. Just as quickly as it made its surprise stop, it would move on and out of sight. But I always have that memory of the beauty of that butterfly. Learning comes and goes just like that butterfly, but once we have the vision, we have it forever. We can call that vision back up when we need it.

And, I couldn't memorize. I remember one marching band season where our band director came in and said that we had to memorize our music instead of using music holders. I was a better than average trumpet player who became less than average on the field that season because I couldn't memorize the music. I knew then I could never be the next Louie Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie because I never saw them playing off a music stand.

My whole career, I wouldn't tell anybody about these deficiencies, otherwise they'd boot me right out of teaching and I knew I couldn't support my family while flipping burgers. And, since I've been able to fool everyone all these years, I finally thought, what the heck, maybe I'm not the only teacher who suffers these same problems. Maybe I'm not as dumb as I thought.

Now, I'm not mentioning any of this to get you or me depressed about the future of teaching, I'm just trying to be honest. I have to work for what I get, others have to work for what they get, and, at times, even though we wish it was easier for all of us, we've got to come to terms with personal short-comings.

It's because of these short-comings that I like to work with other teachers. I have to embrace my short-comings. There are much smarter people than me, much better teachers than me, and by the grace and patience that they give me, I can improve at helping kids learn and feel a little more success and self-worth.

So back to the wikimath and what it means to someone like me. It makes me wish that Mrs. M. and I had more time to plan for this wiki. She has a great vision of learning, is one of our master teachers, and knows how to teach math well. But, we each had six classes, school obligations, families, meetings; it all adds up to very little time to plan.

Even with these limitations we decided to jump into the wikimath. We figured that, just the act of structuring a second daily period where students would get to mix with math concepts with technology, that it certainly couldn't hurt them in preparation for the May tests. So we passed a couple emails, chose the indicator theme, put together a few guidelines, discussed a picture of what we each wanted to see come out of this project, and we jumped in.

Originally, we were going to do a blog, but I decided to go the wiki route after thinking that the blog wasn't structured enough to offer the links we wanted to see. If we had more time, we wanted to work through an indicator ourselves, just to see where the possible pitfalls would be. I wish we had the time to do.

We didn't have the background experience in place or the hours of deliberation that teachers normally have when they plan an activity. I didn't know if the wiki was the right way to go, or if it would support the vision completely without causing a big mess. What if the kids didn't accept the project, or what if we got started and we didn't have the software tools in place to support them if they did embrace the project? I had never done a wiki before, so I didn't know the problems we might encounter.

Some of the pre-planning deficiencies did cause some problems, but, so far, we've been able to overcome them. Supplies included an 8mm video camera, (no capture card in school but I have one at home), a digital camera, access to a smart board (Students have been using it all year in Mrs. M.'s math class), and the 28 computers in the lab. Of course, our district tech guys have Deep-Freeze installed on our computers, so, if we needed to get some freebies installed, that wouldn't be done over night. As it was, we needed to get Windows Media Encoder and Audacity installed onto the computers which, we have Audacity now but no encoder, yet. We do have Window's Movie Maker on the computers which one group of 3 students used as of yesterday.

After 7 class days into the project and 2 of those 7 days without internet access, we did encounter some successes and some "not-yet" successes. I set up a video camera to record the class one day, just to see if students are on task. I'm afraid to view it, yet, but I promise I will. My cursory glances around the room in between motivating pep talks, answering questions, and trying to help students understand the indicator their working on, have show that a large percentage of the students are on task.

Each day at the beginning of class, I would try to re-affirm the importance of what they are doing, how they will be helping themselves and their classmates learn math. And, with the growing list of wiki hits picked up on our clustr map, I've been trying to point out the interest others around the world have in what these students are doing. (Talk about Schlechty and affirmation...this seems to be a natural.)

I have noticed problems in the lab, especially on the 2 days the internet went out, but since I'm in the middle of the organized chaos, I still have to step back, blog it out for a while, and reflect and analyze what I think is going on and compare it to what might really be going on in that room. The students were instructed that, what ever you were going to put into a wiki, you could type into Microsoft Word and perform a copy and paste later when the internet would be accessible. I think the internet outage effected about 50% of the kids, but I could have mis-read what was going on. I had to send for something called "math books" to be brought down to the lab so that the students could keep working on the indicators.

This morning (day 7) Mrs. McMahon (real math teacher) and I (real math teacher wannabe) talked about what we would have done different already. For example, Mrs. M. felt that with the indicators that we were too specific for the student choices. She said that we should have had the students work on math strands and concepts, develop those, and afterwards we would squeeze them into indicators. Those indicators are hard for teachers to know what they mean let alone to have 7th graders try to find the meaning. From my perspective I'd have to agree. Let the student's teach pythagorean theorem, scientific notation, and 3-dimensional shapes rather than something that says; Analyze problem situations involving measurement concepts, select appropriate strategies, and use an organized approach to solve narrative and increasingly complex problems.

Even though I have a math certification and I've taught math in the past, I looked at those indicators and thought, "What are these things?" I visited the Ohio Dept. of Ed web site and looked at their info for teachers and parents, viewed the Ohio Math Content Standards, and I realized that the idea of putting together a wiki to explain and give examples of each indicator would help me, parents, students, and math teachers. There just doesn't seem to be good examples, definitions, and quality teaching examples being produced by the leadership that are easily found and available for free downloads, assuming that ODE has produced them. No wonder our nation is slipping in math; we can't comprehend the indicators. Just kidding. I'm sure the real math teachers understand them just fine.

This leads to a weakness in the plan that we'll try to resolve next week and that is we'll make a switch for a day. Mrs. M. will get her math classes started and then we'll sprint down to each other's room, and I'll watch her math classes while she'll try to answer a few specific math-related questions in the tech class.

Another problem we're trying to resolve is that of learning math in a 21st century context. Both of us believe that an inhibitor to math learning is it's lack of "realness" to students. "When are we ever going to use this," has always, in the past, been the over-riding question of math students. I haven't heard that question, yet, but since one of our guidelines from the beginning of the wiki was to find real applications of their indicator, I've been trying to focus student attention to finding authentic examples of where their indicator is used in real life and try to teach that.

It would have been nice if I could have gone through the 7th grade math curriculum completely so that, when questions came up on how to find those connections to real life, I'd have a good handle on where to direct them to find the answer. That's where my library reference-skills background helps quite a bit but I still have fallen short on answers. Luckily, I've got a fast pen and scrap paper, so I can quickly write a pass and say, "go see Mrs. McMahon."

Another problem is my insecurity in knowing that what we are trying to accomplish is going to be successful. I want to be sure that the time invested by everyone will be time worth spent. Maybe that's unrealistic, but I wish I could be certain that the outcome will show some of the descriptors I put into a rubric that I just put up on the wikispace. I watched a great student produced video, Project Based Learning: Mummified Chicken, Mutant Frogs, and Rockets to the Moon and from that decided to visit the website of the Minnesota New County School where I found a rubric that they use at their high school. It didn't totally fit what I wanted to see but some of the decriptors formed the basis of the rubric we're using.

Assessments are another weakness of mine. A problem I'm facing now is, how do I measure the success students are having. How can I be sure that each student is on the right path of learning the things we want them to learn? In theory, I should be able to visit each wikispace and see the accomplishments of each student. I'm trying, but I don't have the organization of time (or maybe I don't have the time) to visit every page every night. And, if you remember from my story about how I learned math a little slower than others, I need the extra time to cogitate on each student's page.

Until this project is done, until we get to assess success, and until we see the final product, we won't know if "the juice was worth the squeeze." I think it is and I think we've had some successful pages already because they match the rubric. One good example is Kara Y.'s page. She had ownership and self-direction. And I think I see that in others but I haven't been good at measuring that. When I look around, I think the majority of students are self directed while a couple are snickering over something and a couple more are not anywhere near completion. As soon as I recognize that, I grab that rubric and have a one-on-one talk about being more self-directed, completing the rubric, staying on task when there are so many distractions on the internet, and reminding them that people across the world are visiting these pages. I also know that these conversations are a part of the daily, teacher's life and that there doesn't seem to be more of these discussions than normal, so that's a good thing.

So if you come across this blog, visit the harmon mathwiki site and see what positives and negatives you see from the product point of view. I'm always open for suggestions. Make a comment here. I check it every day when I have time.

At some point, when the project is done and if we see the mathwiki succeeding the way we envisioned, we'll have to decide how to invite others to join in to build a real math educational experience. Wouldn't it be neat to have, just like the wikipedia, a 21st century source for math education where all math instruction can be found in a 21st century context? What if we had a data base of all that we teach and how to teach it, not just math, where every piece was proven to have connections to the real world and in a way that it meant something to the students that will be learning it?

Are these delusions, or, with the power of the wiki and internet, the strength and participation of forward thinking people, are there a group of us able to accept the need for educational change, and make now the right time to initiate that change?