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: