Two math-related posts to read while you're waiting for your first set of finals to come in

​In case your brain needs a break, here are two of them - one serious, and one not so...

​1. The serious one:  Q & A with Carol Dweck

Dweck answers questions specifically about the participation of women and minorities in higher-level math and science fields of study.

 

2. The light-hearted one that will make you weep with frustration: Headlines from a Mathematically Literate World 

A free scanner in your pocket

Free scanner!  And it fits in your pocket.

Leah Glashow-Mandel found this great resource, called Camscanner, an app which essentially turns your smartphone into a scanner.  

Just download Camscanner, and you can take pictures of student work -- posters, papers, etc:

(Here's one Summer McCall took to use as a model for her other classes)

Finals? 1 easy way to have your students do the heavy lifting of review, collaboratively

Very often, we as teachers tend to do the difficult thinking and evaluating that we want our students to do.

A case in point: test review.  We'll often spend hours culling through material we've taught to create review guides -- and we end up doing the kinds of high-level thinking we want the students to perform, asking ourselves questions like:

• What is most important out of what we've learned, and why?
• What are the essential facts and pieces of discrete information?
• Why do the concepts in this unit matter?
• How do the ideas and information from this unit connect to others?

But aren't these the kinds of questions, ideally, that we want our students to ask?

Well, Charles Schubert has found a fast and easy way to involve his students in the heavy lifting of unit review -- he has them collaboratively compose unit reviews on Google Docs:

Click to see an example.

Charles used the concept of "fat" and "skinny" questions that he got from Summer McCall: he has students, in groups, compose both open-ended questions that demand complex answers (the "fat" questions), and close-ended questions with concrete answers (the "skinny ones.)

Here's the process, as he describes it:

The process was just to pair them by table, have them review their notes and then brainstorm for a few minutes. I explained what "skinny" and "fat" questions were (thanks to Summer). After a few minutes brainstorming they opened the shared google doc which I set up for them by table and had them fill in two skinny questions and one fat question. They saw what other people were writing and kind of edited their questions on the fly to make theirs unique. That was pretty much it, took about 20 minutes.

They post their questions on a Google Doc, and, voila! -- instant review.

You can check out a sample, here.

Thanks to Charles for sharing this, and to Summer for the question idea!  Happy review, all.

Help students study with digital flash cards

Guess: what is one of the most effective ways students can learn new material?

It might not be what you think -- it's not creating diagrams or concept maps, and elaborating on those, or re-reading material, or highlighting, or going over notes. It's...

...retrieval practice.

Or in layman's terms: quizzing. (More about that here and here, in the New York Times, here in one of the original studies published, and here, in a study about optimal spacing of retrieval practice.)

Now, "retrieval practice" can mean a variety of techniques -- the initial study that prompted this conclusion involved students engage in a "free recall" writing quiz.  But the effects also seem to hold for many forms of quizzing, including a time-tested and time-honored method:

flash cards.

(Streicher, Diane. "Flash Cards - Latin." Photograph. 4 May 2012. 

"Flashy Fun." Diane Again. Web. 08 Nov. 2013.)

Increase learning with a single click: turn on the captions

(Image from "Export a Video with Captions," from TechSmith.com)

Want your students to understand more when they watch videos about content? All it takes is one click:

Turn on the captions.

You can embed videos in Google Forms!

Here's another great new superpower from Google -- you can embed videos in Google forms.

This means, for example, that you could assign a video for homework, and attach a series of quiz questions to measure student understanding ...or open-ended questions to generate discussion or determine what you need to teach in class.

(You could even use Flubaroo to instantly score student responses and send them feedback...more on that later.)

CLICK BELOW TO TRY IT OUT:

Collaboratively annotate images in Google Drive

Google keeps secretly adding new features to Google Docs.

They have just added a new feature that will allow your students to have a substantive discussion about an image:  a chart, graph, map, work of art, or photograph.

All you have to do is upload an image to Google Drive and share it.

Tech celebration: Students get immediate feedback on their projects through clickers

Kudos this week to Lance, Julie, and Ann, for finding a useful solution to a pervasive peer feedback problem.

Students rest after a workout, and Julie directs them to click in their feedback.

The problem: peer evaluation is difficult to manage 

If you've ever wanted to solicit useful feedback from your class on another student's work, you've run into a problem.

You have students create a project with other students as an audience (a new fitness routine, for example) and maybe have their peers write them feedback on tiny slips of paper -- then do you collate them?  Average them?  How do you get that information to the people who really need to see them:  the creators of the project? This usually requires laborious sorting by hand, or Valentine's-Day-like-drop-offs on a military scale.

There is an easier way.

Wanna make a bet about finals? Predict what your students will get wrong.

A student pretends to take a really, really difficult final.

So, a recent piece of research from Harvard revealed that the students who learned the most had science teachers who both  a) knew their content, and b) knew their students -- that is, the science teachers who could accurately predict the questions their students would miss on a final were the teachers who were the most powerful teachers.  I'm betting this is true for all disciplines. If it's true, then it offers a great way for you to check and improve your practice.

The Research
According to researcher Philip Sadler, in this overview of the research in The Harvard Gazette, it absolutely does matter that teachers know their content:

What our research group found was that for the [content] that people considered factual, teacher knowledge was very important. If the teachers didn't know the facts, they couldn't convey them to the students

But if you care about conceptual understanding, knowing your students matters more:

For the kinds of questions that measure conceptual understanding, even if the teacher knew the ... explanation, that wasn't enough to guarantee that their students would actually learn the [content]."

Tech celebration: Travelling to Mars (and Tempe) virtually, doing science for real

Mr. Winters and a student astronomer measure attributes
of the geology of Mars, using satellite image data.

This week, a shout, or a whoop, goes out to Mike Winters and his intrepid astronomers, who are pursuing real research projects using real data from a real planet, and collaborating with a real researcher -- though they are doing most of the work virtually.

Students identified variables, constructed research protocols, and created proposals, with the always gentle guidance of Mr. Winters.

Then they presented them to a real scientist, live.

Tech celebration: literacy, collaboration, multimedia, and math via Google Docs

Overdue props this week for Kelly Lantz and her students, who have done remarkable collaborative work this semester, seamlessly integrating visuals, equations, and language to explain difficult and complex concepts. Concepts that I dimly remember thinking I understood, back in the day...  but it's clear I didn't understand them as well as these students did -- as their lengthy and elaborate explanations attest.

And what's more, they did all this beautiful and rigorous work despite the fact that there was no grade attached.

Create annotated visuals with ThingLink

Here's a great tech tool tip from Rachel Maleski:

I'm a visual learner, which usually drives my husband nuts whenever we're trying to assemble a new item. Imagine how well that went when we had 80 million pieces of baby gear to put together a few years back. I wanted to sit and read the directions and look at the visuals, whereas my kinesthetic better half wanted to dive head-first into assembly.

Neil Flemings VAK (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) model suggests that certain people learn better through certain modes. And while, in my humble opinion, everyone learns in a combination of varied modes, sometimes certain concepts are best taught in conjunction with visual aids.

ThingLink is a great web-based tool that allows users to take any image and then tag it with information, including the ability to link to other websites. The terms of use say that anyone of any age can use ThingLink, but that children under 13 should be supervised during use. It does require a  sign up using an email address, but there is no confirmation email so students can sign up for free accounts.

Trick students into showing in-depth analysis: have them annotate a PDF

If you're tired of having students write essays, but still want to demand in-depth thinking and elaboration, you can try something Liz Rodock tried -- to great effect: have them annotate a PDF.

(This is an image of a fantastic analysis created by Stefanie Tedards -- see the original here: View Download)

Can the shape of a country determine its economics?

An interesting analysis about how the shapes of countries may affect their historical and economic destinies (and the blog it appears in -- Strange Maps):

It’s Always Chile in Norway: the Five Types of Territorial Morphology

And the blog it appears in, Strange Maps, which includes odd tidbits like...

To teach science (or any complex subject), tell a story

I know some of you have seen this before -- it's a great story in Tyler DeWitt's TED talk, "Hey, science teachers, make it fun!" (full TED talk from beginning here)

Below is a link to the particular story, as he tells it, of the bacteria and the virus -- as a horror story.

Click the image to see just the story itself:

(This also has to be about the best use of PowerPoint I've seen -- using it for what it is really best for -- using images and text to add to and help listeners make sense of a riveting narrative.)

DeWitt also makes a compelling case for teaching versions that are simplified, even at the cost of some precision (the same reason high school students learn the Bohr model first, before the atomic orbital model).

If you want to turn your content into a story, you might start by picking one of the "seven basic plots," a relatively arbitrary but durable set of compelling storylines from myths to movies:

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor: Science, Literacy, and Humor

Want to see if your students really understand the content?  Force them to explain it using only simple words.

Maybe you've seen this text editor -- it's an online tool, created mostly in jest, to force scientists to rewrite their often turgid prose into easier-to-read sections.

Students who communicate more on line earn better grades -- and exclude others?

We had a great conversation yesterday in our PLC about whether or not digital tools are "rewiring our brains" in a bad way.

Then, today I learned of an interesting study that suggests that a higher rate of online communication leads to better grades (in a college setting).

However, there's a darker side to this: when students were left on their own to communicate digitally, the higher-achieving students formed 'elite' social circles and actively shut out the lower-achieving kids.

Which to me, suggests that we need to be careful as teachers.

So, how should we structure assignments, activities, and our classes to increase communication, but decrease exclusivity?

Here's the article, from Science Daily:

Working alone won't get you good grades

Posted: 31 Jan 2013 11:44 AM PST

Students who work together and interact online are more likely to be successful in their college classes, according to a new study.

Plus, there's a cool graph of student connections -- higher-achieving students are blue; thicker line connections suggest repeated communication.

A game that helps students experience the speed of light

Some six-year-olds, like my son, are able to run at or faster than light speeds -- so they claim -- so they are comfortable with the relativistic changes that occur at high speeds, in which space warps, invisible light shifts into the visible spectrum, and they see images of objects as they existed in the past. However, most of the rest of us terrestrial snails cannot conceive of the ways in which the universe changes for objects that are moving at or near the speed of light.

However, there is hope; a light at the end of tunnel.

The people at MIT's Game Lab have found a beguiling way to create a sensory gaming experience that mimics and demonstrates many of the shifts that occur at relativistic speeds:  time dilation, Doppler effect, searchlight effect, and Lorentz transformation, for example.  It's called A Slower Speed of Light.