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.

Curation

So far I've "played" with diigo, twitter search, feedly, and pinterest.  I also have a twitter account where I follow some math geeks that I've discovered through conferences, but don't do a good job of keeping up with the tweets.

I see myself using the pinterest account as a place to store ideas both for my classroom and my personal stuff.  I could get lost in the home ideas out there.  Way too much for me to do!  I find it a bit frustrating that a lot of the teacher stuff out there seemed to be looking for payment.

I think my team has determined a way for us to organize all of our bookmarks using diigo.  We've created two separate groups - 5th grade teacher & 5th grade student.  We are using the teacher group for professional sites, and the student group for actual sites for kids.   We are being diligent about tagging with really helpful tags so we can efficiently search.  Our plan is to then transfer these links to our 5th grade teacher pages as we need them for each unit.  Hopefully this will keep the page a bit more manageable than it has been in the past.

I think I have enough curation tools at my disposal.  Now what I need is time to actual curate!  I suppose it takes time to learn who has good stuff and who has crud.  Now that I have a better understanding of how to organize it, maybe I can spend some time this summer curating, organizing, and evaluating.