A Different Perspective

An anonymous reader left the following comment (I reprint it here unedited except for the exclusion of a personal attack on one of the regular contributors to our discussions here on TP):

Unbelieveable...if you people really think that this is the successful way to the future, then your as stupid as the students that cant spell the word 'future'. Students have no social skills what-so-ever being raised in a computer generated world. They have no English skills as a result of comp slg...oh what you dont know what computer slang short-cutting is. The have no spelling skills as a result of spell check. Good luck living in a collapsed society ripe for a Chinese take-over when the idiots you put out in the world try and run this country. If society truly allows this to happen, you'll doom us all...

I invite all of the readers of this blog and all of the members of this PLN to please leave a comment in response to this statement.

I'm sure that you all will have a wiser and more lucid set of responses than I could manage alone.

Reader Responses

In response to my call for reader input, here are some of the responses:

Reader Elise:

I follow you because I feel like the Elementary students that I work with are heading to a paperless system. I struggle, however, with how to balance their need to learn to read and write with books and paper with how to read online and type in the digital age.

I would love to hear more about how teachers might move to less paper at the elementary level.

Reader D.:

I'm interested in many things but especially how to entice the technophobes to march with us in the parade.

Reader Heather:

The tools have not been difficult; in fact, I love them. However, joining the conversation has been challenging for me.

Reader Foxdenuk:

Wondering if there is anything that you can find in books which you can't find on the Internet.

Reader Erik:

The process of getting students to listen to each other, even with tools like edmodo and google docs, has been my challenge.

I'll keep these comments in the front of my mind as I blog over the next week. As always, thanks for the discussion! Blogs without reader input and response aren't blogs; they're vanity mirrors.

You all make this more.

Asking the Readers

Seems like just yesterday when I started this blog, but now I notice that I'm about to hit 550 posts since February.

Don't know whether that's a result of a "sincere commitment to enriching the blogosphere" or just a result of my OCD, but in the interest of regulating my blog-narcissism I'm asking you all for some input.

I'd like to know what sorts of things you are interested in discussing related to paperless classrooms, educational technology, and social media.

You have personal experiences and insights you'd like to share with our broader community? Then get in touch.

You have ideas for the Friday Chats? Share them.

You've started a blog, app, site, or online community? Let me know and I'll help to spread the word.

The key here is community, and as we turn the corner towards the heart of autumn, let's work on building that community and sharing what we've learned over this remarkable year.

Math Week: Readers' Ideas

Readers weigh in with 'Math Week' ideas, comments, observations, and suggestions...
Noah Geisel on finding and using tools:

Regardless of what subjects we teach, the innovative and "authentic" ways in which many of us are incorporating tech were not necessarily obvious to us from the start but we realize that we are limited only by our imaginations in utilizing the tools that are out there. It's no different for math and science; the tech exists, they just need to find it!

Norman Constantine on math and keyboards:

It is a question of what you are used to seeing as notation. Programmers have been writing code that produces massive calculations using a keyboard.

Reader Jeremy isolates a problem (and offers tech know-how to fix it):

Math homework is such a freeform method of writing. The only things I've found to accomodate it requires the student to learn a dizzying array of buttons to click on or some sort of syntax to represent equations within the confines of a sentence like structure. It's ironic, because I often tell people where I work that the hardware is no longer the problem in education. It's the innovation of individuals that is the missing ingredient. Maybe math is the one area that isn't quite true yet.... We need a tool that allows students to build equations visually, the same way they would on paper. The trick is going to be a GUI that is easy to use and only requires a mouse and keyboard.

Mark Pullen offers a suggestion for elementary school math:

For lower elementary, ixl.com is a great site that has very specific practice sets on every single topic (or close to every topic) you would need in a given school year. If you wanted to shift to web-based math for 2nd-5th grades, I'd go there.

Reader DGM cites Webassign.net:

They have deals with various textbook publishers for automated marking of the maths problems in the back of textbooks.

Kax offers a bunch of good resources:

Graphcalc.com is a site recommended by Ira Socol because it can integrate into Word or Google Docs. I have not tried it out yet. We have Geometer's Sketchpad at my school which is a great program for exploring all levels of math. Dan Myer has a great blog where he gives creative ideas for authentic math at http://blog.mrmeyer.com/. I also like the idea of mathcasts; I would like to have students create their own videos explaining math concepts that would become a library for help that students could access for help at home or if they are absent.

Brian gives a resource for adding equations to blogs:

If you are trying to get an equation into a blog or wiki, there is a relatively (notice the word relatively) easy way of doing it now thanks to LaTeX.

And Russ comes in with various ways to present math in projection:

People without Smart boards, but [who] have a projector for a computer, may be interested in the wiimote whiteboard project, to turn any surface into an interactive whiteboard with the use of a wii remote control. Improved versions may be available via sourceforge. Geogebra, would look fab, throwing graphs up on the wall, via wiimote whiteboard, interactively. And Sketchup (free 3d drawing program), great for elementary and middle school, tesselations, modeling, 3d dimensional construction, angles. See Bonnie Roskes' books at 3dVinci, geometrics, and modelmetrics. Co-author Jon Choate will be presenting at the NCTM conference in Boston this Oct. I love Sketchup. His zebragraph website has the .ppt's on a previous NCTM presentation. I'm head-over-heels over Sketchup, really!

Mind you, as a teacher in the Humanities, I really knew nothing about any of this cool stuff. Just goes to show what a great readership can do to help fulfill the promise of a blog.

You guys rock!

Math week continues tomorrow with a personal story of math agony.