Every second week, “Aunt Math” sends a math word problem in the form of a letter to students recounting math experiences she has had with her neices and nephews. These stories are usually seasonal or center around another theme. The stories are easy to read, in large print and entertaining. At the end of each story, Aunt Math poses a math problem for students to figure out. Within the site are also tips for solving math problems, information on how these problems are related to math curriculum for parents and teachers and Aunt Math also provides solutions to each problem. The site also provides easier math problems for younger students or students who are having difficulty with the math concepts creating a nice scaffold for the various levels of students in your class. As the easier problems share the same storyline, students don’t have to feel that they are doing something different because they are “dumb”.

Unfortunately, the thing that really made the site neat and interactive has been discontinued. When students were done with their solutions, they could write in to Aunt Math and explain to her their solution and how they figured it out. The responses from all the students would be listed on a seperate page like comments on a blog. Aunt Math would write back giving them tips or encouragement. My students really enjoyed that aspect and would take the email home to show their parents. As I checked back prior to writing this, I discovered that that is no longer being done. Citing a “commitment to promoting responsible use of the Internet for children,” the site has stopped responding to individual e-mails. Now, I am not sure how this is promoting a responsible use of the internet as it seems to me that they are just advocating that students should not be using the internet as a communication tool at all instead of teaching how to use it safely. Also, if you were advocating a safe and responsible use of the internet wouldn’t you just set guidelines as to how comments were placed on the site along with a way to filter comments instead of going completely to one end of the spectrum and banning any communication at all? I think the site is just taking the easy way out.

Having said that though, the site is still useful and I enjoy the stories and challenges. It makes word problems that are more interesting and relevant for students.

Today I am going to provide you with another resource that I use time and time again. Whenever I need graph paper, I always you this resource to print out paper for my students to use. The resource is a series of graph paper with the intersecting lines at various sizes. You choose which type of graph paper to use depending on the size of the squares you want to have. I don’t remember where I obtained the resource but it is one I use over and over again. They come as one .pdf file.

linedgrids.pdf

I’m a little late this week with edtech thursday. I had a busy day with a whole bunch of things going on. Anyway, I thought I would continue with looking at web2.0 graphing and survey tools.

I was originally introduced to a neat tool called Zoomerang a few years ago. Unfortunately, they have gone to a more fee based model. There are some aspects of it that are still free but it has sort of lost it’s appeal to me as a tool. One tool I have started using is Free Website Polls (www.free-web-site-polls.com). It is a nice and easy poll creator. It’s not fancy which is part of its appeal. Once the poll is created you can publish it to your blog, either on the side bar or within the blog itself. Anothernice thing is that you can only vote once. Clicking on one of the selections willtake to the results page where you can see the results.

So, how do we include this in our class?

Well, first of all, there are so many connections to math. You could set this up with students and get other schools participating. Our class will set one up on the class blog and collect data on favorite subjects. We will then use the Rich Chart Live to post the results on the blog. You could do this with any subject. For Language Arts, you could use it as a way to predict what will happen in a next part of a book you are reading. You could also have a book contest where you have students reading a selection of books and poll which book is the class favorite. Students could then do reviews of the book stating why it was their favorite, posting those answers to the blog.

How do you use online polling in your classroom?

Over the next couple of weeks I thought I would talk about a couple of survey/graphing tools I think would be really neat to use with the class.

One tool I really like is Rich Chart Live (http://www.richchartlive.com/). It is a great way for students or yourself to create graphs and publish them. The graphics are rich, colourful and completely customizable. You have control of all the settings including the type of template you want to use, your data entry, the style of the data collection, and layout. It can even be animated. When you are ready to publish, you can publish the information as a flash file or you can place it into a powerpoint or blog or print it off as a web page document. Now, you’re probably thinking, “All this and it’s free?” Well, there are a few caveats. None huge though. The one thing is that if you are not purchasing their services, they will place a small logo on the graph, which is hardly anything at all. The other issue may be the fact that they use ads on the site. I’ve never had a problem with the ads but you never know what may come up and where students might click. So, you may find that these are enough not to use the site or not. I think that with any site, students need to be taught that their movements are being tracked and that if they are going to be clicking on inappropriate links than their privileges may be taken away.

Here is a sample:

How do we use it in the classroom?

Well, for elementary it might be hard unless you do it as a whole class project. After awhile though, they would probably get the hang of it (Grade 3 and up). I used to have students use the Microsoft wizard to make graphs and they seemed to catch on after awhile though they just used the basics of it. This might be a little too much though as there are so many choices. I think it would be an excellent tool for a whole class project and the results could be posted on the class blog. It could also be used in conjunction with a smartboard.

For higher grades, students could complete surveys and graph them posting the results to their blog or incorporating them into powerpoint presentations. Last year, I had a class of Grade 3’s graph heights of famous buildings to create powerpoint presentations as part of their building unit.

Graphs for blogs could also highlight results of questions you may have asked parents thereby communicating decisions to parents.

Let’s have a conversation!

How could this resource be used in your classroom?