What if Khan Academy did Angry Birds?

I'm not a big fan of Khan academy for teaching math. The explanations are frequently unclear, and they do not address many of the things I would want to teach my students. They are also almost exclusively procedural, and simply present information just like it would be delivered by a boring math teacher in a classroom. As Dan Meyer points out in this video, Khan gets it all wrong on how to present a new topic to math students. Watch:




So why are American kids so far behind in math compared to countries like Japan, Finland and Switzerland? This video says it all in a minute and a half: math teachers in the US explain things too much. They don't allow their students to struggle with information and try to figure it out on their own.

As is shown in this video, also critical of Khan's methods, American math education is based on the "explain and practice" model, while other countries' models are based more on having the students figure things out on their own.



Meyer is sponsoring a contest on his blog for teachers to send in their video commentary on a Khan Academy video; you can go there to see more of the entries. (The first video I've posted here is Meyer's own entry.)

Great math games site

One of my colleagues showed the rest of our department members this very cool math games Website called Manga High. The games here are very creative, well designed, and some of them get pretty difficult pretty fast. There are games to fit most grade levels from about grade 7 upwards, although some of the "Lite" versions would be accessible to even younger students.

One of the downsides is that the games are Flash-based, so you (or your students) can't play them using an iPad.

But a great feature for educators is that you can sign up for a free trial account that will allow you to set up your classes so that you can track whether or not and for how long students are playing, what levels they achieve for each game, and more. So a homework assignment might be "Reach level 6 playing the game "Save Our Dumb Planet".

The trial only lasts for 30 days, so like many Websites, they hook you in and then make you pay to keep going. The site doesn't indicate how much a full subscription costs, but I requested a school quote.
Even without the class setup for monitoring and tracking you students, it's still a great math game site; I will have my students using it regardless.

A book about flipping your class from the guys who started it all

I was reading this article on Emerging Ed Tech, which is basically a rave review of a book by John Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two of the leading pioneers in the flipped classroom concept. The book is entitled "Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day". This review sent me to the Amazon.com page to look it over, and I read several of the reviews there; most of them were also quite positive.

So I ordered the book, only $9.95 for the Kindle version; since I've moved overseas, the Kindle has been a Godsend for me. Since I'm planning to experiment for the first time with flipping my 9th grade math class this upcoming school year (I mean, starting on Monday, that is), I figured some tips and advice from two of the experts might come in handy.

So, I'll give it a look and let you know what I think. Not that I'm an expert...

Is it time for BYOD?

This video from Marc-André Leland is about the benefits of student BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). It states the case for this practice pretty well, and also points out some limitations. The one limitation that he leaves out is the issues that can arise for the teacher when you have students using several different operating systems, platforms, and interfaces all at the same time for the same assignment. I've found with my middle school students, who are pretty tech savvy, sometimes have difficulty figuring out how to do things on their Macs, iPads, other tablets, and iPhones when I showing them something using my old decrepit classroom PC. Fortunately, I'm a Mac user at home, so I can help them out most of the time.

But, this little video has some good stuff, and if your colleagues and/or admin are still resistant to BYOD in your school, either send it to them, or use the content to help you formulate talking points to help make your case.

Here it is:

Dan Meyer, amazing educator

I watched this TED video of Dan Meyer explaining what is wrong with the the way most math curricula teach problem solving. The video is on an Educational Technology and Mobile Learning post; I did not watch all of them, but you may want to check out the others as well. I went to his blog, and this guy has some truly incredible stuff.

I've spent he past hour or so looking at some of Dan's curricula, sample problems, ideas, thoughts, and philosophy about teaching math. Truly impressive. He's already given me about 100 new ideas, plus all of his curricula are posted on the blog for download - all under a CC attribution license.

If you're not a math teacher, check it out anyway.

If you are a math teacher, go to this site.
Now.

Google Forms tutorial

Not a lot to comment on here, just a good reference that fits in with this week's Wiki assignment. I found this video tutorial on some advanced features in Google Forms at Educational Technology and Mobile Learning. The video is of a Webinar session, and is about an hour long. I haven't watched all of it yet, but what I did see looked pretty good.

Parents hurting Facebook?

I found this article on the Huffington Post Tech page, where one analyst claims that many teenagers are moving away from Facebook because their parents are using it. It follows that age-old belief of teenagers that if you parents are doing it, it must not be cool. The article also cites an AP report that says kids are getting fed up with friend requests from parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and so are flocking to Twitter for their social networking.

This all struck me as interesting, and made me think about what we're doing as educators using technology. Will our efforts to bring the technology our students are using into the classroom make it become "uncool"? If your parents on Facebook is not cool, how about your teachers asking you to do school stuff on Facebook? Apply question that to any number of emerging technology applications.

My students sometimes send me friend requests on Facebook, but I do not have current students as my Facebook friends; too easy to post something you really don't want your students reading. With that in mind, I think we need to take care in how we're using technology in our teaching, and how much we're using technology in our teaching. We may get to the point that our students will start seeing too much of a good thing, which may well start to turn them off rather than motivate. As with anything, a good balance and mixture of technology and "traditional" teaching methods is the way to go.