iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

I had the opportunity to talk about math on a recent episode of “Rad Parenting” hosted by author and parenting expert Anea Bogue and comedian and record label owner Joe Sib.

Math in the Common Core era is a hot button for so many parents. And often not in a good way. So I was asked to speak about  how parents can best support the mathematical development of their children.

In our conversation, I referenced three tips to guide parents in their math conversations with their children, as well as several resources parents can use to support and guide their efforts. This post recaps those three tips and shares links to resources.

I hope it also starts a math conversation with parents. If you have questions about how best to support a child’s mathematical development, please ask me here. Anea and I hope to have a follow-up conversation on the podcast to answer questions from parents.

I'm currently flying home the ESC-20 Library Resource Roundup in San Antonio, Texas. Before I boarded the flight the gate agent was looking for volunteers to take an alternate flight due to overbooking. This seems like a good time to share the TED-Ed lesson Why Do Airlines Sell Too Many Tickets?

Today was the first day of school. Words can’t describe how great it felt to be back in the classroom; a combination of joy, satisfaction, wonder, and excitement for the year that lies ahead. Summer was great – being away from routine enabled time for relaxation and reflection but being with students today was an inspiring reminder of the purpose of our work as educators.

I presented at a conference over the summer (CEMC) where I talked about how I frame the school year. One question that I often get about the thinking classroom framework is how to fit in curricular outcomes. It seems easy to engage kids with awesome problems, puzzles, and games but teachers say they have to go back and “teach the curriculum”.

My quick answer to that question is that I set the stage for thinking during the first two weeks of school by doing my best activities (not related to one specific curricular outcome). These are my top shelf activities that are super engaging. During these two weeks, kids get used to thinking, they build relationships through collaboration, and they build confidence and autonomy by having their ideas heard and valued. After this phase, I start to bring in tasks that are more related to specific curricular outcomes and since the stage is already set, the kids approach those problems with the same level of engagement and deep thinking.

"Toy Theater is a website that offers a huge library of online games that students can play to hone their skills in language arts and mathematics. Toy Theater also offers a large library of virtual manipulatives that you can use in your mathematics lessons."

Every year my classroom and the needs of each student become more diverse. Just teaching my grade-level curriculum is not enough to close the gaps for struggling students or to keep my advanced students moving ahead. For every student to make at least one year’s growth, I have to find ways to individualize their learning.

But how? Here are three ways that I am personalizing the math experience.

Math Learning Center offers ten free apps that are designed for teaching elementary school mathematics lessons. All of the apps are available in versions as free iPad apps, as Chrome apps, and for use in the web browser of any computer. With the exception of the flashcards app, all of the Math Learning Center's free apps are designed to provide you and your students with virtual manipulatives. By the way, the flashcard app is available in English and Spanish.

Like a lot of students, many elementary school teachers dread math class. But, according to a new study from researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education, when teachers reexamine how they were taught math and their perceptions of their ability, student test scores and attitudes about math dramatically improve.

When teachers reexamine how they were taught math and their perceptions of their ability, student test scores and attitudes about math dramatically improve, according to a new study.

The research, which appears in the journal Education Sciences, shows that fifth-grade teachers who took an online class designed to give them a different approach to mathematics teaching and learning, achieved significantly higher test results for their students compared with a control group of teachers in the same schools who did not take the class.

In the last decade, educators have focused on boosting literacy skills among low-income kids in the hope that all children will read well by third grade. But the early-grade math skills of these same low-income children have not received equal attention. Researchers say many high-poverty kindergarten classrooms don’t teach enough math and the few lessons on the subject are often too basic. While instruction may challenge kids with no previous exposure to math, it is often not engaging enough for the growing number of kindergarteners with some math skills.

During the last school year, only 40 percent of fourth-graders nationwide scored at a proficient level in a nationwide math assessment. Even more alarming, just 26 percent of Hispanic students and 19 percent of African-American children tested proficient in fourth-grade math. That is significant because strong math skills are needed for some of the fastest growing jobs of the next decade and are requirements for many of the highest paying jobs. Understanding and being able to work with numbers “is a fundamental skill for success in almost any occupation you might choose,” said economist Greg J. Duncan of the University of California Irvine’s School of Education, whose research examines child poverty and education. “It leads to the analytic, higher-level thinking that’s increasingly important.”

At this day and age of educational technology (i.e. the use of electronic gadgets like iPads in the classroom), these online math resources may help you solve basic to advanced equations in no time:

Math used to be all rote memorization and pencil-to-paper equations disconnected from the real world, but more and more teachers are realizing the importance of making practical, relevant connections in math.

We asked our audience of educators: How do you use the real world to teach math? We’ve collected some of the most interesting answers, ways teachers are connecting math to the everyday lives of their students.

When parents try to help their kids with math homework, it's usually been a while since they've sat down and tried to work out a math problem themselves.

Mumsnet user lucysmam found herself in this scenario and turned to the internet for help, posting a photo of her daughter's math assignment on the parents' online forum.

"Has the math brand become toxic? That was the provocative question posed by Conrad Wolfram in a blog post earlier this summer. “Sadly,” he wrote, “I’ve started to conclude that the answer is yes.”

That conclusion may seem startling, especially as Wolfram is the strategic director of Wolfram Research, and one of the brainchild behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica, a system widely used in technical fields to process complex computations and calculations. His critique, in a nutshell: math instruction has become too fixated on computation—solving for x, for example—and removed from real-world applications and data.

Today, Wolfram is the founder of Computers-Based Math, an effort that he described as “building a new math curriculum that assumes computers exist.” In the following interview with EdSurge, he explains what exactly that means. (Note: the interview has been edited for clarity.)"

We are a global community of mathematics teachers and supporters who want all learners across the globe to experience joy and wonder in school-relevant mathematics

Welcome to MashUp Math, a mathematics education YouTube channel run by young teachers on a mission to meet the unique needs of students with a visual learning preference. We know that learning math can be challenging and we're here to help you reach your potential as a math student by sharing animated video lessons and strategies and insights for being a successful student. We add new videos every week for elementary and middle school math, algebra, and geometry. Our lessons are aligned with national learning standards and are made using animation software; they are colorful, engaging, and easy-to-follow.

Below is a collection of some good iPad apps to help students with their math homework. They provide detailed instructions on how to solve a wide variety of math problems covering different mathematical topics from algebra and trigonometry to complex calculus and statistics. The main educational strength of these apps is that by walking students through math solutions, students get to enhance their mathematical thinking, develop new skills and learn from the process. Some of these apps are featured here for the first time. We invite you to check them out and share with your students.

What does it take to improve student success and interest in math? The Philadelphia-based Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) asked more than 400 U.S. high school math teachers for their advice related to teaching and learning mathematics.

“The good news is that students can have success in math class with the right effort, attitude, and behavior, regardless of a natural affinity or being ‘good at math,’” said Michelle Montgomery, project director of the MathWorks Math Modeling (M3) Challenge at SIAM. “Using quantitative skills to solve real, open-ended problems by employing the mathematical modeling process is a great way to get started.” 

Engagement leads to optimal learning and students learn best when they are actively immersed in collaborative hands-on activities. One way to get students engaged is through game-based learning. By including quality games in your class, you will get to create meaningful learning experiences that will benefit students' cognitive, social and emotional growth. In today’s post we are sharing with you this handy visual featuring some awesome skill-building math games to use with your students in class. The visual is based on Marcus Guido’s post ‘ 20 Engaging, Skill Building Math Games for Kids (1sth- 8th Grade)”. We ‘ve only included 10 games, check out the original post to learn more about other games.

Summer is a time for play and rest, family time and adventures. But there’s compelling research to show that kids forget a lot of what they learned during the school year if they don’t have opportunities to continue reading, using their mathematical thinking skills and exploring the world around them.

It’s also been well-documented that the gaps between kids from high and low socioeconomic statuses grow over the summer. Affluent kids often have access to enriching experiences like travel, summer camp and visits to museums. Summer may be one of the most unequal times of the year, and that makes it hard on teachers in the fall. But there are plenty of low-cost ways to keep kids learning through the summer without sitting them down to do worksheets or drilling them on a math app.

Years ago TED-Ed started a playlist of video lessons called Math in Real Life. That playlist that started out with just a couple dozen lessons has now grown to include 82 lessons. The "real life" context in these lessons isn't things like "how calculating percentages helps you be a frugal shopper." The "real life" context found in the videos in the Math in Real Life series is broad in nature. For example, you will find lessons about how math is used to guide ships and why airlines often sell more seats than they have on an airplane.

A while back I shared a post with a list of 20 great YouTube channels for Social Studies that I curated for a teacher inservice I was leading. Recently I had the chance to do the same thing again for a group of elementary math teachers.

Once again I searched for great YouTube channels that these teachers could use with their students to teach new content, provide extra review, or explain math topics in a different and engaging way. Some of these channels and playlists are created by talented teachers sharing their classroom creations with the world, while others are made by companies, TV shows, and more.

Below are 18 of the channels I found that are worth checking out for your classroom if you teach elementary level math. For my training I was shooting for grades 3 through 5, but many of these cover lower elementary grades or extend up into middle school.