Jo Boaler - Stanford class

I signed up for an on-line course from a Stanford professor about learning math.  I wasn't sure I would get through the entire course and sure enough I didn't.  The first video though was very interesting as she interviewed Stanford students about their thoughts, feelings, and memories about math.  I must say it was really discouraging.  Her main point was that math was a subject that alienated kids for a host of reasons.  Some felt they were the wrong gender, some thought they weren't smart enough, some felt that they could never measure up.  These were Stanford! kids.  Imagine how a "regular" kids have felt across the years.  There was a lot of discussion about how their teachers really didn't understand math and there seemed to be only one way to do a problem.

Lure of Labyrinth

In years past we have attempted to implement an online problem-solving program with our fifth-graders.  It is out of Maryland.  I have always felt a bit sheepish asking kids to use it as I had never investigated it myself.  I didn't know how it worked, what the goals of the program were, or what essential learnings or standards it addressed.  So I spent some time investigating the program further.  I was able to set up a teacher account which allows me to view what my students are doing on the program.  I can see where they have been successful and what problems they have attempted.  In addition I was able to view all of the teacher videos that taught me how to use the puzzles and resources with my class, and how to support my students, and how it tied to learning outcomes.  I learned that the game is aimed at 6-8 graders and that many of the outcomes are above and beyond where I might expect even my gifted math students to go. 

I also learned how to navigate through the program and that it has a feature that allows me to set up teams of students.  They can communicate and work together to solve the puzzles.  The beauty though, is that the numbers in each puzzle change each time it is loaded so a child can continually attempt a problem and when they solve it, they can only talk about how to solve it and not an actual answer. 

The premise of the game is very engaging - the kids are rescuing pets and have a monster avatar.

I decided I would introduce it to my classes although I don't expect all kids to enjoy it or be successful.  I look at it as an opportunity for kids who are ready for challenges to have an engaging challenge.

Roll Out

We implemented our roll out for our fifth graders.  Although many things went well, lots of things didn't.

 First we found that all Google passwords should have been reset before we allowed anyone to login.  Many, many children forgot their passwords from fourth grade and far too much time was spent individually resetting passwords and thus much of the content we wanted to teach them wasn't taught. 

Second, we found that we aren't using the shared folder's for sharing of work.  We have found it much more helpful to have the kids name documents with a specific naming convention so that we can search for documents by name and then save them in a specific folder of our choosing.  So we won't have them set up their folder that way next year.

Third, we are finding it very difficult to keep fifth graders from messing with their desktops.  We have had complaints from our librarian, and study hall teachers that kids are messing with their desktops.

We are finding that although the idea of a single computer assigned to a single kid might be attractive to some, it is not working well in the fifth grade.  The amount of time spend casing, uncasing, retrieving, and putting back is far out weighing any benefit of the having just one child on a computer.  We are losing a lot of instructional time.  I would again advocate for a cart per homeroom to be used by 2 students.  We had few problems when 5 kids shared one computer, I think two kids would be fine and the streamlined use and fewer transitions and storage issues would far outweigh any perceived problems.