I'm a very social creature by nature, and generally find I'd rather be spending time with students than in my office (even when being in my office means I'm doing very important, frequently time sensitive work that I'll end up taking home if I don't finish). So, when the math teacher came over to have me help him double check that a website he wanted to use would work, and after seeing him and his students go into one of the labs, I just couldn't help but go over and visit.
The students were using classzone, a website I wasn't familiar with. The math teacher said it was set up to work with their math books, and was free. I had poked through it after testing, but wanted to see it in action.
The students were using it for practice problems and practice quizzes. While I was there, one of the kids vaguely griped about needing paper to do the work. I suggested using a drawing program, such as sumopaint. I bit my tongue right after it came out, not sure if I was now stepping on toes or not, but the math teacher was very interested to see it in action.
It was fortunate, but about half of his seven students were in one or more of my electives where I'd introduced the program. It was used to varying degrees of success. I reminded one of the girls she could use layers to "hide" past problems and work on new ones. I had to remind others to adjust their brushes to be more useful. Some kids did not like having to erase, and others just weren't into use the mouse as a pen (I can't blame them). I'd say about half the students used sumopaint for paper, while the other half found the recycle bin next to the printers and used real paper. (Except one student who appeared to be doing all of the work in her head, which impressed me since it was all decimals and fractions).
A few minutes later, one student pulled out a calculator, and the boy next to him decided he needed one also--but he hadn't brought one. I had him google the term scientific calculator, and suggested he click on the web 2.0 calculator because it sounded promising. Shortly, several students had that tab open on their browser.
I showed one student, and the math teacher, how to use tab+tilde to tab through different firefox windows (obviously I'm a mac school). Some students used that trick, other used the F3, other used their mouse.
a few minutes later, I saw the math teacher showing one student Khan Academy. At the end of class, he said to me that the students had impressed him by being able to multitask so well that he wanted to try one more tool and see.
I'm blown away. Not only did the students rise to a new challenge, the adapted. They each were responsible for deciding which tools to make use of and which to abandon. The used processes individualized to their own needs. And the teacher stepped up "just to see." I can't say enough about how much that impressed me.
At the very end of class, the math teacher called the students over to see the result for one student who had attempted a quiz. He showed how the system marked answers right and wrong, and how as students that could use that to determine which topics they needed to focus more on, and which topics they could comfortably decide they were strong in.
I think in the end the entire period was in exercise in students defining their own learning. I would wager that most students don't remember all of the websites used, but I'm forwarding the links along to the math teacher.
classzone
sumopaint
web2.0 scientific calculator
khan academy
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