The Coordinate Plane Exchange

Over this past Summer, I came up with a really cool telecollaborative design project for use in my middle school mathematics classroom. For this project, I decided to have students create a coordinate plane picture and record the coordinates for the points of their picture. The teacher would then upload the original picture and points to my telecollaborative site where I would match them up with another group of students to use their pictures to transform (translate, reflect, rotate, dilate) the points on the coordinate plane and upload the new image and coordinates.

Now that I have some experience with Web 2.0, I can see an advantage of using these types of tools for that project. I think it would be great for students to collaborate with the original artist to get help if they get stuck transforming the picture. This would require some sort of comment tool like in a blog. Although this is not a necessary step, it would cover a covert goal of teaching netiquette in the middle school classroom through use of appropriate comments and responses.

I really like my telecollaborative design project and can't wait to get the time to actually implement it. I can see the effectiveness whether I go with a Web 1.0 format or a Web 2.0 format, but I think the learner interest may best be suited for a Web 2.0 environment if possible. Web 2.0 is the way of the future and it is important to use it for some covert goals to get students ready for the 21st Century workforce. After all, I don't like writing blogs, but I am getting very accustomed to following and reading other blogs. My latest, Elana's Pantry, with some great gluten free recipes for Girl Scout cookes. What's a cookbook again? Ain't nobody got time for that!

Quadrilaterals on Facebook

Very recently, I got to teach a lesson where students created a Facebook profile for a quadrilateral. The point of the lesson was to have students display their knowledge of one quadrilateral and its relation to other quadrilaterals. It ended up being a lesson for me in scaffolding instruction based on learner interests. Although about 80% of my students enjoyed and understood immediately how to fill out the timeline, I had a percentage of students (mostly boys) noted that hey didn't understand the assignment because they had never been on Facebook. This struck me as very odd, but it made me realize immediately that this was one of those times I really should have focused on learner interest to differentiate my instruction. In the past, I had done WANTED posters for this portion of my quadrilateral lesson. In light of doing the lesson this year, I think I will offer both options as a choice for the next assignment in the future.

Aside from the implications of for my learning, this lesson taught me a lot about the role of social media in the classroom. It taught me that if I plan to use something like Edmodo (a definite plan I have for next school year) that I will have to scaffold my introduction to this great classroom tool. I will have students that automatically understand the network's workings and may need to work more on netiquette while others will need a lesson in the how to's of using Edmodo.

Socially media is here for the NetGeneration, and it doesn't seem to be a fading fad. This makes it a great resource for student engagement, but it is also like most things tech and public education, there are the haves and have nots. As a teacher, this is something I can't forget about if I truly want to meet the needs of every learner.