Thoughts on the course.
So, first of all, the official theme of the course is Web 2.0, with a focus on how it can be used in education. While "Web 2.0" is one of those buzzwords that gets used in ways that make its meaning blurry at best, let me start by summing up what I think the point of Web 2.0 is. It seems to me that in the early days of the internet (even going back to the days of things like gopher) the main point of the internet was that there was a heck of a lot of content available, and it was linked together. The web was all about ways of using those linkages between content pages to make the content more useful. The difference with Web 2.0 is that we are now paying more attention to the fact that there are a heck of a lot of users out here, and exploring ways in which we are (or can become) connected, and making use of that. Certainly, early distributed computing projects (SETI@Home, e.g.) were using that network of users, but the way it has evolved in things like Social Networks and Wikis really shifts the way people make use of the internet. Combine that with the tendency for things like the internet, cellphones and television to all become one big thing, and you've got Web 2.0.
OK, so the idea then is that kids today are growing up in a world where social networking and peer collaboration are the default mode for using the internet, and not only are Web 2.0 tools potentially useful, they may be a better way to address the educational needs of this sort of technically literate kids. It is hard to make what we are trying to teach seem vital and relevant if it is delivered in an archaic, dusty package.
Side Note: there's also an increasing trend in society towards home-made, hand-crafted stuff. A sort of return to old-school craftsmanship and the kinds of personal connection to the things we use that technology risks pulling us away from. Interestingly, its off the most technologically savvy folks who are also into the hands-on, real world stuff. There's probably a mirror-image version of this course that's all about real-world, physical Maker stuff in education...
Overall I really enjoyed the course -- it was well-designed, fun, and got me thinking about some good things. It is a little odd doing it during the summer, but at the same time it feels much more managable as a self-paced thing over the summer than trying to keep up with everything during the rush of the academic year. I think the thing that we really miss during the summer is the feeling of community and teamwork amongst the "class" -- we can check everyone's progress, read the blogs and so forth, but we're not sitting around the faculty workroom talking it out and showing each other cool things we've figured out.
I think that the tasks for exploring tools were an important task, but also some of my least favorite part. The suggested tools mostly didn't really seem like things I'd want to use, and it felt like sort of a challenge to find things that were relevant to my courses and also felt like proper web2.0 tools (rather than just computer tools or internet resources). I ended up getting good, practical information out of the tasks, though.
The RSS subscriptions I've accumulated have been handy, and fun. I'm not sure about the news crawler I created (haven't deleted it yet, but it's yield rate is pretty low), and I'll probably ditch iLearn, but I'm glad I set up my Google Reader. I don't think del.icio.us has really taken off for me, but that's also because I haven't done as much exploring as I could. Certainly the idea of social bookmarking has a lot of potential to help find good stuff on the web.
Even apart from technology, I think collaboration and social interaction are key to learning. Things that students talk each other through and have fun working together on are always easier to learn, and more memorable as well. So ultimately what I want to do is add a technology component to that process. Also, in the case of trying to use a Wiki, I want a more permanent document of the FTG course. I want it to have interactive sketches and links to useful information (internal and external). I want to take the fact that there are always kids who like getting everything written down and organized, and use it to help the kids who can't keep track of things on paper.
I've got one major project (FTG Wiki) that I intend to pursue, but I also think I'll be looking at the flow of the year with somewhat new eyes. I may see opportunities to use technology that I didn't see before. One picture going around the internet this week is a big sign advertising an "Introduction to Facebook" course with a phone number to call for reservations. The joke/point being that calling a telephone number to reserve a slot in something like that is the sort of thing people used to do before Facebook. A little like sending a telegraph "Wireless radio invented. how will it change the world". And nobody who needs the course will think it's odd or old-fashioned at all. Similarly, I may be more aware of the things we do that the kids think are silly and old-fashioned, or which should probably be superseded by something new.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Technical Details
Here are some of the basic issues I encountered with implementing math tools in a Wiki.
First, both of the tools discussed here require files to be loaded (once) onto the Wiki server. In Wikispaces, this seems to be most easily accomplished by going to the Manage Wiki page (available through the nav-bar on the left of the screen) and going to Files. That lists the files that various users have stored for the Wiki (like images and so forth), and lets you upload individual files from your computer.
As far as I can tell, if you need to reference the file or its location, then mywikiname.wikispaces.com/file/view/foo.bar works as a directory/url. And you do need to use this for both of these tools.
AsciiMathML:
The main thing here is that each individual page in the Wiki has to load the javascript that creates the MathML, and should do it before the actual equations kick in. There's still a detail I need to work out here about making this happen automatically when a student creates a new page. There seem to be some options for setting the style/format of the Wiki that will let me do this. The worst case scenario would be that every time a page is created, students need to embed a little widget at the top of the page that loads the script. This would be the sort of thing that kids would forget to do, or put in incorrectly, and I'd constantly have to check any new pages and fix this if needed. For Demo purposes, I just put in a widget right at the top and it seems to work fine.
For the widget, you can basically copy the code from the AsciiMathML page, but be sure to put the directory path to the actual Wiki copy (see above).
The actual Ascii to MathML conversion works, but is more finicky than I would like. There seems to be a decision between using auto-math recognition mode or a more formal grammar. The auto-math lets the kids type things in more or less the way the might in their calculator, and is the one I lean toward. That "more or less" is the trick -- its a little bit finicky, and will take some real getting used to. It looks to me like I'm going to need to provide a page of examples and tips if I'm going to use it, and even then I suspect there are going to be a lot of kids who don't really get the hang of it. Kids who are good at using it should probably be commissioned to debug equations on the fly.
Anyway, the implementation isn't too bad here. The real problem is display issues with MathML, which only seems to work well in Firefox and Opera, and not at all in Safari.
Java Sketchpad
You start by creating a sketch in GSP. Include whatever labels and so on you want, and resize your window to whatever size you actually want the thing to be as an applet. Once you get the sketch and layout the way you want it, do Save As and save it as a java sketchpad document. Note that there are some features of GSP that are not implemented in JSP, and the Sketchpad folks provide a page that lists those features and suggests some work-arounds.
When you "Save As" a Java Sketch from GSP, what you create is an HTML file with an embedded java applet. Getting it into your Wiki requires a couple of things. First of all, you need to upload the .jar file jsp5.jar into the Wiki. You only need to do it once. Next, you need to open up the HTML file that GSP created in a tab in your browser and open up its source code (under Firefox, that's View - Page Source or Ctrl-U). Now, the stuff that begins with < applet > and ends with < /applet > is the part you want. Create an HTML widget in your Wiki and paste this in.
There are at least a couple of things you need to edit in this code, unfortunately. The most important is where it says < codebase="." > you need to change it to < codebase="./file/view" > . This tells the applet where the .jar file is, and it won't load without it. The other thing you need to change is the "align = center". Apparently the actual alignment is called "middle" not "center", and even though browsers will interpret it correctly as is, the Wiki won't let you save malformed HTML. You should probably either change it to "align = middle" or "align = none".
First, both of the tools discussed here require files to be loaded (once) onto the Wiki server. In Wikispaces, this seems to be most easily accomplished by going to the Manage Wiki page (available through the nav-bar on the left of the screen) and going to Files. That lists the files that various users have stored for the Wiki (like images and so forth), and lets you upload individual files from your computer.
As far as I can tell, if you need to reference the file or its location, then mywikiname.wikispaces.com/file/view/foo.bar works as a directory/url. And you do need to use this for both of these tools.
AsciiMathML:
The main thing here is that each individual page in the Wiki has to load the javascript that creates the MathML, and should do it before the actual equations kick in. There's still a detail I need to work out here about making this happen automatically when a student creates a new page. There seem to be some options for setting the style/format of the Wiki that will let me do this. The worst case scenario would be that every time a page is created, students need to embed a little widget at the top of the page that loads the script. This would be the sort of thing that kids would forget to do, or put in incorrectly, and I'd constantly have to check any new pages and fix this if needed. For Demo purposes, I just put in a widget right at the top and it seems to work fine.
For the widget, you can basically copy the code from the AsciiMathML page, but be sure to put the directory path to the actual Wiki copy (see above).
The actual Ascii to MathML conversion works, but is more finicky than I would like. There seems to be a decision between using auto-math recognition mode or a more formal grammar. The auto-math lets the kids type things in more or less the way the might in their calculator, and is the one I lean toward. That "more or less" is the trick -- its a little bit finicky, and will take some real getting used to. It looks to me like I'm going to need to provide a page of examples and tips if I'm going to use it, and even then I suspect there are going to be a lot of kids who don't really get the hang of it. Kids who are good at using it should probably be commissioned to debug equations on the fly.
Anyway, the implementation isn't too bad here. The real problem is display issues with MathML, which only seems to work well in Firefox and Opera, and not at all in Safari.
Java Sketchpad
You start by creating a sketch in GSP. Include whatever labels and so on you want, and resize your window to whatever size you actually want the thing to be as an applet. Once you get the sketch and layout the way you want it, do Save As and save it as a java sketchpad document. Note that there are some features of GSP that are not implemented in JSP, and the Sketchpad folks provide a page that lists those features and suggests some work-arounds.
When you "Save As" a Java Sketch from GSP, what you create is an HTML file with an embedded java applet. Getting it into your Wiki requires a couple of things. First of all, you need to upload the .jar file jsp5.jar into the Wiki. You only need to do it once. Next, you need to open up the HTML file that GSP created in a tab in your browser and open up its source code (under Firefox, that's View - Page Source or Ctrl-U). Now, the stuff that begins with < applet > and ends with < /applet > is the part you want. Create an HTML widget in your Wiki and paste this in.
There are at least a couple of things you need to edit in this code, unfortunately. The most important is where it says < codebase="." > you need to change it to < codebase="./file/view" > . This tells the applet where the .jar file is, and it won't load without it. The other thing you need to change is the "align = center". Apparently the actual alignment is called "middle" not "center", and even though browsers will interpret it correctly as is, the Wiki won't let you save malformed HTML. You should probably either change it to "align = middle" or "align = none".
Task 12 -- Sharing
In the summer, when teachers are scattered and pursuing their own interests, it can be a bit tricky to get a group together in person, so I decided to do some electronic sharing. There are enough department members who are regularly checking their school email this summer that I figured I'd get decent feedback from at least 2-3 people.
What I wanted to do was give people a sample of the sort of thing I hoped to do with a classroom Wiki. I figured an email describing the idea abstractly would tend to sound like a lot of buzzword-laden hot air (which is what 95% of teacher training is anyway, but I like to think this course is part of that other 5%). "I've been learning to leverage new technology paradigms by crowd-sourcing the learning process through web2.0 media!" Anyway, I also figured making a demonstration page would help me figure out technical hurdles and test the technology anyway.
My basic goals were to
There were quite a few technical hurdles to even creating the page. I'm going to detail those in a separate post. I figure there might be other people looking for similar technology solutions who would appreciate a little technical advice. I will definitely say that if I weren't an old-school computer geek I would have probably been so frustrated with embedding Java Sketchpad that I would have just given up. It's great software, but the GSP folks are doing a surprisingly mediocre job of making the implementation easy, especially since their market should really be the average geometry teacher.
Having sent the link around, I didn't get as much feedback as I would have liked. I'll actually get more feedback and discussion from the department as time goes on, but having given it a week or so, I figure it is time to write things up and move on. There were a couple of teachers who had interesting things to say, and a few more who at least looked at the link, which is a start.
I think the most important thing I learned from a technical point of view is that I've had to face up to the technical limitations of MathML itself. As a tool, it does exactly what I need: display math equations embedded within the text of an HTML document, with formatting and so forth handled seamlessly behind the scenes. As a tool for actual use in the real world, it has a key limitation: browser compatibility issues. Firefox and Opera have both been designed to use MathML from the beginning. Running Firefox or Opera on a modern Windows PC gives you pretty much automatic MathML as far as we need in the class. Using certain sorts of more esoteric math symbols does require installing a font package, but I don't know that that poses an issue for what I need. Running Firefox on a Mac works, but the browser will nag you if you don't have the special fonts (even if it displays OK without), and there are discussions on the web that suggest that it may continue to nag you even after you install the fonts. This last point is something I need to investigate -- it could be a deal-breaker. It's possible that has been fixed in more recent releases of Mac Firefox, but I don't know. If not, users may need to fool around with some fiddly preference settings to avoid the nagging, which would really stink. Running IE only gives you MathML if you install a plug-in (DisplayMath or some such), and then works fine. Running Safari or Chrome, you are screwed. MathML has been on Apple's "real soon now" list for Safari for years and years, and at this point presumably won't happen.
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a problem with "Use Firefox", since its free and available for Mac, PC, and Linux. And I always encourage students not to use IE anyway. The Safari and Chrome thing nags at me a bit, since it also suggests that there won't be any portable internet devices (iPads, iPhones, Droid-based devices...) that can properly view MathML. That feels like putting an expiration date on any webpage that uses MathML to me. Still, I think the main thing I need to check out is the font issue -- how difficult is it to install the fonts, how annoying is the nag message if you don't, and does the nag message go away without fiddly user intervention.
The Java Sketchpad doesn't really seem to have big browser compatibility issues, though obviously you need a decently up-to-date version of Java installed and active on your computer. There are memory/load-time issues with loading up a page with java widgets, so I would tend to think that limiting a page to 1-2 at most is going to be necessary.
As far as curriculum and so on, the feedback has been positive but wary. People tend to think that it might be neat, and that the Wiki itself would be a good resource to have. But they also are paranoid about how hard it will be to produce, whether the students will want to do it, and so on. From my point of view, I figure there's no harm in trying, as long as I don't lose perspective on the thing. If the kids really hate it, I won't push the issue so hard it makes everybody miserable. If enough of them think it's fun that we produce much of anything, then it doesn't matter if we leave the job partially done -- it can be an ongoing project, and it's supposed to evolve over time anyway. And even if all we end up with is an online syllabus/outline and some review on a handful of key concepts, that's still better than nothing.
What I wanted to do was give people a sample of the sort of thing I hoped to do with a classroom Wiki. I figured an email describing the idea abstractly would tend to sound like a lot of buzzword-laden hot air (which is what 95% of teacher training is anyway, but I like to think this course is part of that other 5%). "I've been learning to leverage new technology paradigms by crowd-sourcing the learning process through web2.0 media!" Anyway, I also figured making a demonstration page would help me figure out technical hurdles and test the technology anyway.
My basic goals were to
- Create a sample Wiki page
- Implement MathML equations on it using AsciiMathML
- Embed at least one interactive Java Sketchpad widget
- Send the link and an explanatory email to my department
- Respond to feedback
- Think about implications for the project -- do there need to be changes?
There were quite a few technical hurdles to even creating the page. I'm going to detail those in a separate post. I figure there might be other people looking for similar technology solutions who would appreciate a little technical advice. I will definitely say that if I weren't an old-school computer geek I would have probably been so frustrated with embedding Java Sketchpad that I would have just given up. It's great software, but the GSP folks are doing a surprisingly mediocre job of making the implementation easy, especially since their market should really be the average geometry teacher.
Having sent the link around, I didn't get as much feedback as I would have liked. I'll actually get more feedback and discussion from the department as time goes on, but having given it a week or so, I figure it is time to write things up and move on. There were a couple of teachers who had interesting things to say, and a few more who at least looked at the link, which is a start.
I think the most important thing I learned from a technical point of view is that I've had to face up to the technical limitations of MathML itself. As a tool, it does exactly what I need: display math equations embedded within the text of an HTML document, with formatting and so forth handled seamlessly behind the scenes. As a tool for actual use in the real world, it has a key limitation: browser compatibility issues. Firefox and Opera have both been designed to use MathML from the beginning. Running Firefox or Opera on a modern Windows PC gives you pretty much automatic MathML as far as we need in the class. Using certain sorts of more esoteric math symbols does require installing a font package, but I don't know that that poses an issue for what I need. Running Firefox on a Mac works, but the browser will nag you if you don't have the special fonts (even if it displays OK without), and there are discussions on the web that suggest that it may continue to nag you even after you install the fonts. This last point is something I need to investigate -- it could be a deal-breaker. It's possible that has been fixed in more recent releases of Mac Firefox, but I don't know. If not, users may need to fool around with some fiddly preference settings to avoid the nagging, which would really stink. Running IE only gives you MathML if you install a plug-in (DisplayMath or some such), and then works fine. Running Safari or Chrome, you are screwed. MathML has been on Apple's "real soon now" list for Safari for years and years, and at this point presumably won't happen.
Anyway, I don't necessarily have a problem with "Use Firefox", since its free and available for Mac, PC, and Linux. And I always encourage students not to use IE anyway. The Safari and Chrome thing nags at me a bit, since it also suggests that there won't be any portable internet devices (iPads, iPhones, Droid-based devices...) that can properly view MathML. That feels like putting an expiration date on any webpage that uses MathML to me. Still, I think the main thing I need to check out is the font issue -- how difficult is it to install the fonts, how annoying is the nag message if you don't, and does the nag message go away without fiddly user intervention.
The Java Sketchpad doesn't really seem to have big browser compatibility issues, though obviously you need a decently up-to-date version of Java installed and active on your computer. There are memory/load-time issues with loading up a page with java widgets, so I would tend to think that limiting a page to 1-2 at most is going to be necessary.
As far as curriculum and so on, the feedback has been positive but wary. People tend to think that it might be neat, and that the Wiki itself would be a good resource to have. But they also are paranoid about how hard it will be to produce, whether the students will want to do it, and so on. From my point of view, I figure there's no harm in trying, as long as I don't lose perspective on the thing. If the kids really hate it, I won't push the issue so hard it makes everybody miserable. If enough of them think it's fun that we produce much of anything, then it doesn't matter if we leave the job partially done -- it can be an ongoing project, and it's supposed to evolve over time anyway. And even if all we end up with is an online syllabus/outline and some review on a handful of key concepts, that's still better than nothing.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Task 11 - Implementing the Tools
Since I'm taking the Pi2.0 course over the summer, this is where I outline some plans for using some of the tools we've been looking at. The course where I have the clearest idea of what I want to do is FTG. Having a Wiki that outlines the major topics and techniques learned, and gives students a handy reference for review would be very useful to a lot of students. More importantly, having students actually work to create that Wiki would be even more useful.
The bare minimum job/contents of the Wiki are
A large portion of the course is very visually oriented. Geometry and graphing both need lots of diagrams. So another issue is going to be producing good sketches. The secret weapon here is probably Geometer's Sketchpad, which not only can produce accurate elegant geometric images, but more importantly can produce interactive java widgets. In other words, students can produce diagrams that are better (more fun, more illustrative, more memorable) than the kinds of things found in books, because we're doing this on computers.
Part of what makes collaboration on a project like this worthwhile is that different students will bring different skills to the table. Just doing the things above brings in lots of different skills. For example, some students will be eager to produce content, but may not be great at working with the equation tools, or may have a hard time expressing themselves clearly. Other students will be good editors who will be able to tighten things up, look for math errors, or convert awkward "email notation" math into proper equations. Other students will be good at using Sketchpad or other graphics tools to create illustrations. Other students may be better aware at the global structure of the Wiki and see how cross-linking pages can really be helpful. Other students may be good at ferreting out interesting external pages that are worth linking to.
The discussion pages are good places for students to help facilitate this sort of collaboration. "Can anybody make a good diagram for the material I added on foo?" or "I wasn't sure how to make this equation look right -- can anybody fix it and explain how to do it?" or whatever. And of course, the fact that Wikis extensively document content additions and revisions helps me know who is doing what.
I would also like to see students with real creative talents get to use them in ways that make the Wiki more personal. Things like cartoons or other illustrations (beyond geometric diagrams) could be great in moderation, for example, and there are some very artistically talented kids in next year's sophomore class. I want to encourage students who have a good creative idea to pursue it -- if some kid wants to include a haiku they wrote about parallel lines, it could be good. The main thing is to keep the extras down to a reasonable level -- things that make the page fun and interesting to read without getting in the way of the content or making the page overly busy. "Creative" doesn't mean turning the page into one of those ghastly pages with blinking text, a zillion animated gifs, a hideous background that makes it impossible to read the text, and a color scheme that looks like a pack of fluorescent markers vomited all over the page.
Given that we dive right in with new material and the first test is only a couple of weeks into the course, the Wiki has to be introduced on day one, which means that I've got a pretty clear list of things to do. I have to do some basic set-up of the Wiki itself. I'll presumably need an assist from Technology in getting the students themselves set up with accounts (if they need to send a confirmation email from a student account it's a hurdle, after all). I have to find a way to clearly communicate goals to the students (and this communication will be part of the Wiki). I have to walk through the process of content creation and editing for the kinds of things the students will be doing, kicking the tires, and thinking about what information and instruction the students are going to need. I have to think about what basic information and scaffolding should be provided by me at the start, and get that in place.
The bare minimum job/contents of the Wiki are
- A basic syllabus (which I'll provide)
- Pages devoted to individual units and topics
- Example problems
- Handy formulas to know
- Strategies for problem solving, things to look for etc
A large portion of the course is very visually oriented. Geometry and graphing both need lots of diagrams. So another issue is going to be producing good sketches. The secret weapon here is probably Geometer's Sketchpad, which not only can produce accurate elegant geometric images, but more importantly can produce interactive java widgets. In other words, students can produce diagrams that are better (more fun, more illustrative, more memorable) than the kinds of things found in books, because we're doing this on computers.
Part of what makes collaboration on a project like this worthwhile is that different students will bring different skills to the table. Just doing the things above brings in lots of different skills. For example, some students will be eager to produce content, but may not be great at working with the equation tools, or may have a hard time expressing themselves clearly. Other students will be good editors who will be able to tighten things up, look for math errors, or convert awkward "email notation" math into proper equations. Other students will be good at using Sketchpad or other graphics tools to create illustrations. Other students may be better aware at the global structure of the Wiki and see how cross-linking pages can really be helpful. Other students may be good at ferreting out interesting external pages that are worth linking to.
The discussion pages are good places for students to help facilitate this sort of collaboration. "Can anybody make a good diagram for the material I added on foo?" or "I wasn't sure how to make this equation look right -- can anybody fix it and explain how to do it?" or whatever. And of course, the fact that Wikis extensively document content additions and revisions helps me know who is doing what.
I would also like to see students with real creative talents get to use them in ways that make the Wiki more personal. Things like cartoons or other illustrations (beyond geometric diagrams) could be great in moderation, for example, and there are some very artistically talented kids in next year's sophomore class. I want to encourage students who have a good creative idea to pursue it -- if some kid wants to include a haiku they wrote about parallel lines, it could be good. The main thing is to keep the extras down to a reasonable level -- things that make the page fun and interesting to read without getting in the way of the content or making the page overly busy. "Creative" doesn't mean turning the page into one of those ghastly pages with blinking text, a zillion animated gifs, a hideous background that makes it impossible to read the text, and a color scheme that looks like a pack of fluorescent markers vomited all over the page.
Given that we dive right in with new material and the first test is only a couple of weeks into the course, the Wiki has to be introduced on day one, which means that I've got a pretty clear list of things to do. I have to do some basic set-up of the Wiki itself. I'll presumably need an assist from Technology in getting the students themselves set up with accounts (if they need to send a confirmation email from a student account it's a hurdle, after all). I have to find a way to clearly communicate goals to the students (and this communication will be part of the Wiki). I have to walk through the process of content creation and editing for the kinds of things the students will be doing, kicking the tires, and thinking about what information and instruction the students are going to need. I have to think about what basic information and scaffolding should be provided by me at the start, and get that in place.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Task 10 - More Tools
In looking over the list of suggested tools for this task, I decided to look at the concept mapping tools. They seemed like a potentially useful tool that hadn't really been covered yet, and I could definitely imagine using them in my courses. The two tools that were specifically mentioned were Gliffy and Mindomo. Of the two, Mindomo is billed more purely as concept mapping, whereas Gliffy is designed to cover a wider range of applications, particularly flowcharts and assorted technical diagrams.
I think both kinds of application mind have some use in the classroom. I can imagine using Gliffy to produce diagrams of problem solving strategies, or maps of dependency relationships between concepts in the syllabus. I think for something like looks a little more like Inspiration, a pure concept mapper should actually be more intuitive, casual, and friendly than either of those two sites however. I found that Bubbl.us might actually be better for this than either of the two listed examples. It's incredibly quick to use, and more fun to actually create content with. I noticed that on a lot of the Math forums on tools for the classroom, Bubbl.us seemed to be the default application for this sort of thing, and I can see why.
Meanwhile, although I suppose, Bubbl.us technically counts as finding another tool, it's really more of the same sort of thing, so I'm going to include one more area of research and a couple of more tools that I might use.
One key issue if I'm going to have students creating a math-related Wiki is that students will need to be able to enter equations into the pages. Here are a few basic strategies for embedding math equations in a web page:
The actual implementation of this might take a little fiddling on my part. What I really have to do is, when I set up the wiki, include the code to load the java script tool as part of the header that is automatically applied to all pages on the Wiki. And, of course, provide basic instructions for creating and editing equations, but the ascii part of it means that most equations are entered in as straightforward a way as possible.
Another possible tool that works great for creating (but less so for editing) is Wolfram's free MathML converter, which takes math expressions (in either traditional notation or Mathematica notation) and converts them to MathML that you can embed on a page. Again, though, the problem is that once you've got a big impenetrable blob of MathML on the page, it's hard to fix small errors without just redoing it. Mind you, redoing is pretty quick. The advantage here is that there is less setup to do on my part, but I'm not so lazy that I don't want to at least try the option that seems like it would be better for the students.
There's a pretty good Firefox plugin that does a similar job to the MathML converter, and gives a UI that's more like the equation editor in things like Word. The plug in is called Firemath , and if I were just casually blogging myself and putting in the occasional equation, it's the sort of thing I might use.
A final option might be to embed the SITMO LaTeX Equation Editor into the Wiki pages. It doesn't really seem like a good solution over all, even though the results are pretty. First of all, I don't really want to have to teach the kids LaTeX (in something like the Math Seminar course I have sometimes done this, but that's a situation where a decent fraction of the students are likely to end up using it later in life). Also, it just seems like a bad mix of difficult editing, third-party dependency (I don't want my future display dependent on SITMO surviving), and so forth.
Anyway, to make a HS Math Class Wiki really fly, I'm definitely going to need support for equations, geometric diagrams (embedding Sketchpad images or java apps is pretty easy, and might do the trick, though they will be less editable than I'd like - the ability for other people to revise and extend your objects is key to the whole Web 2.0 thing), and function plots (I've looked at a few tools for this as well).
I think both kinds of application mind have some use in the classroom. I can imagine using Gliffy to produce diagrams of problem solving strategies, or maps of dependency relationships between concepts in the syllabus. I think for something like looks a little more like Inspiration, a pure concept mapper should actually be more intuitive, casual, and friendly than either of those two sites however. I found that Bubbl.us might actually be better for this than either of the two listed examples. It's incredibly quick to use, and more fun to actually create content with. I noticed that on a lot of the Math forums on tools for the classroom, Bubbl.us seemed to be the default application for this sort of thing, and I can see why.
Meanwhile, although I suppose, Bubbl.us technically counts as finding another tool, it's really more of the same sort of thing, so I'm going to include one more area of research and a couple of more tools that I might use.
One key issue if I'm going to have students creating a math-related Wiki is that students will need to be able to enter equations into the pages. Here are a few basic strategies for embedding math equations in a web page:
- MathML. Looks good, built into recent browsers, but creating and editing the stuff raises issues.
- Image files. There are quite a few utilities for creating png files in a math editor, and they can be embedded like any other image. Fairly easy to implement but has disadvantages in that the source gets lost (so editing involves rebuilding the object) and they are less slickly embedded in text than a MathML object would be.
- Some sort of gadget that embeds an external equation object.
The actual implementation of this might take a little fiddling on my part. What I really have to do is, when I set up the wiki, include the code to load the java script tool as part of the header that is automatically applied to all pages on the Wiki. And, of course, provide basic instructions for creating and editing equations, but the ascii part of it means that most equations are entered in as straightforward a way as possible.
Another possible tool that works great for creating (but less so for editing) is Wolfram's free MathML converter, which takes math expressions (in either traditional notation or Mathematica notation) and converts them to MathML that you can embed on a page. Again, though, the problem is that once you've got a big impenetrable blob of MathML on the page, it's hard to fix small errors without just redoing it. Mind you, redoing is pretty quick. The advantage here is that there is less setup to do on my part, but I'm not so lazy that I don't want to at least try the option that seems like it would be better for the students.
There's a pretty good Firefox plugin that does a similar job to the MathML converter, and gives a UI that's more like the equation editor in things like Word. The plug in is called Firemath , and if I were just casually blogging myself and putting in the occasional equation, it's the sort of thing I might use.
A final option might be to embed the SITMO LaTeX Equation Editor into the Wiki pages. It doesn't really seem like a good solution over all, even though the results are pretty. First of all, I don't really want to have to teach the kids LaTeX (in something like the Math Seminar course I have sometimes done this, but that's a situation where a decent fraction of the students are likely to end up using it later in life). Also, it just seems like a bad mix of difficult editing, third-party dependency (I don't want my future display dependent on SITMO surviving), and so forth.
Anyway, to make a HS Math Class Wiki really fly, I'm definitely going to need support for equations, geometric diagrams (embedding Sketchpad images or java apps is pretty easy, and might do the trick, though they will be less editable than I'd like - the ability for other people to revise and extend your objects is key to the whole Web 2.0 thing), and function plots (I've looked at a few tools for this as well).
Monday, July 5, 2010
Task 7 - Wikis
Today's assignment was to look at Wikis, particularly in the context of classrooms. In particular, the uses of actually setting up a Wiki (as opposed to merely using various online reference sources that are in Wiki format, which the kids will all do at this point anyway).
This is something I probably should have actually done last year in Calculus. The kids set up a Facebook group and so forth already, so they were collaborating online anyway. I tend to think a Wiki would have ended up being a more flexible and powerful tool for some of the things they wanted to do, and it would have been easy to extend it to more robust and practical uses.
While studying Wikis, I looked at a few of the classroom Wikis at school. I started with HS classes that I was pretty familiar with. I started with Brian's AP Envronmental Science class. The main uses that I saw seemed to be 1) for a handy online page of relevant links, and 2) a way to pool data for a collaborative research project. The collaborative material seemed pretty successful -- they ended up with a fairly elaborate list of species found in the Lullwater Creek area with information about diet and so forth. A Wiki seemed like a good way to do this, since a list like that can be added to on the fly ("oh, hey! millipedes! we haven't done them yet!") and that gradual accumulation of group effort is a good way to make the list pretty comprehensive. The links and so forth were useful information, but didn't seem to rely as strongly on the nature of Wikis.
I also took a look at Dave Fergemann's Computer Science class. Again, some of the information was provided by the teacher as a reference to the students. It looked like there were plans to have the students themselves create a handy online Wiki about programming in Python, but that only a couple of students really participated and none of the "advanced topics" actually got written about. Student pages on their individual projects were a pretty good way for students to present information, and these were mostly successful. The individual pages for students to simply write about a topic of interest seemed a little odd to me. For one thing, the actual technical skills involved were usually very minor, so it didn't seem to have a strong curricular use. Also, the content was usually pretty superficial (roughly "I think this is cool. Here are some links") and sometimes questionable (I can do without having classroom pages linking to The Pirate Bay). I did enjoy seeing Daniel's page of photography -- it was simply a showcase for creative work he did outside the class, but it was a nice thing to have.
I finished up with a look at Martha and Brian's classroom page (which we'd seen a little of in a faculty meeting this year). Here, there were a very wide range of uses, and because an elementary class has such a broad scope, the variety all felt "on topic" to me. The accumulated resource model was in effect for doing a cumulative vocabulary list. The showcase for interesting content was in effect for things like one students page on her world travels. There were also a few different programs/resources that were linked together in the Wiki; for example, the poetry page was actually a Google doc.
In general, for my own classes, I tend to think that Mathematics is a very collaborative endeavor. It relies on people sharing information about methods and ways of thinking that they have found useful. Students learn better when they can bounce their ideas off each other, and the process is more enjoyable as well. Ideally, a Wiki in a math class should try to capture some of this collaborative process. One obvious first start would be creating an online review guide to the material in the course. Students always want a Study Guide, and particularly by the time exams roll around if we've been creating review content throughout the term we'd have an Exam guide ready to go. As all teachers pretty much realize, the act of creating review material is, in itself, great review. The act of explaining something to someone else is a great way to clarify your own thinking. This would involve keeping up with the Wiki pretty constantly, if the material is to be available in a timely fashion.
One thing I'd have to think about is how this sort of activity is "counted". There are kids for whom the whole thing would be fun and natural, and they'd dive right in with very little prodding. Other kids would find it difficult and frustrating. I would be inclined to require at least a little Wiki work from everyone, but let the really gung-ho kids go above and beyond the basics. The question is whether merely creating something useful, being appreciated by your peers, and having the teacher say swell things about you in evaluations is enough "credit", or whether I need to formally assign extra credit. I tend to think a smallish amount of Extra Credit for valuable Wiki service is in order. Anyway, something to think about this summer.
This is something I probably should have actually done last year in Calculus. The kids set up a Facebook group and so forth already, so they were collaborating online anyway. I tend to think a Wiki would have ended up being a more flexible and powerful tool for some of the things they wanted to do, and it would have been easy to extend it to more robust and practical uses.
While studying Wikis, I looked at a few of the classroom Wikis at school. I started with HS classes that I was pretty familiar with. I started with Brian's AP Envronmental Science class. The main uses that I saw seemed to be 1) for a handy online page of relevant links, and 2) a way to pool data for a collaborative research project. The collaborative material seemed pretty successful -- they ended up with a fairly elaborate list of species found in the Lullwater Creek area with information about diet and so forth. A Wiki seemed like a good way to do this, since a list like that can be added to on the fly ("oh, hey! millipedes! we haven't done them yet!") and that gradual accumulation of group effort is a good way to make the list pretty comprehensive. The links and so forth were useful information, but didn't seem to rely as strongly on the nature of Wikis.
I also took a look at Dave Fergemann's Computer Science class. Again, some of the information was provided by the teacher as a reference to the students. It looked like there were plans to have the students themselves create a handy online Wiki about programming in Python, but that only a couple of students really participated and none of the "advanced topics" actually got written about. Student pages on their individual projects were a pretty good way for students to present information, and these were mostly successful. The individual pages for students to simply write about a topic of interest seemed a little odd to me. For one thing, the actual technical skills involved were usually very minor, so it didn't seem to have a strong curricular use. Also, the content was usually pretty superficial (roughly "I think this is cool. Here are some links") and sometimes questionable (I can do without having classroom pages linking to The Pirate Bay). I did enjoy seeing Daniel's page of photography -- it was simply a showcase for creative work he did outside the class, but it was a nice thing to have.
I finished up with a look at Martha and Brian's classroom page (which we'd seen a little of in a faculty meeting this year). Here, there were a very wide range of uses, and because an elementary class has such a broad scope, the variety all felt "on topic" to me. The accumulated resource model was in effect for doing a cumulative vocabulary list. The showcase for interesting content was in effect for things like one students page on her world travels. There were also a few different programs/resources that were linked together in the Wiki; for example, the poetry page was actually a Google doc.
In general, for my own classes, I tend to think that Mathematics is a very collaborative endeavor. It relies on people sharing information about methods and ways of thinking that they have found useful. Students learn better when they can bounce their ideas off each other, and the process is more enjoyable as well. Ideally, a Wiki in a math class should try to capture some of this collaborative process. One obvious first start would be creating an online review guide to the material in the course. Students always want a Study Guide, and particularly by the time exams roll around if we've been creating review content throughout the term we'd have an Exam guide ready to go. As all teachers pretty much realize, the act of creating review material is, in itself, great review. The act of explaining something to someone else is a great way to clarify your own thinking. This would involve keeping up with the Wiki pretty constantly, if the material is to be available in a timely fashion.
One thing I'd have to think about is how this sort of activity is "counted". There are kids for whom the whole thing would be fun and natural, and they'd dive right in with very little prodding. Other kids would find it difficult and frustrating. I would be inclined to require at least a little Wiki work from everyone, but let the really gung-ho kids go above and beyond the basics. The question is whether merely creating something useful, being appreciated by your peers, and having the teacher say swell things about you in evaluations is enough "credit", or whether I need to formally assign extra credit. I tend to think a smallish amount of Extra Credit for valuable Wiki service is in order. Anyway, something to think about this summer.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Task 6
This one is all about exploring some possible tools and thinking about how they could augment a class.
I decided to pass over Skype, since I've been using Skype for several years, and "exploring" it doesn't really seem like something I need to do. Next up, I tried "TeacherTube" and was pretty unimpressed. All the videos are education related, but the quality and variety of education videos is far lower than what you get on actual YouTube. As far as I can tell, the only potential advantage is the usual complaint that YouTube comments are vile and horrible (which they are), but I'd rather use comment-circumventing technology than limit myself to the videos here. One note is that for non-members, there's a 30-second advertisement video you have to watch before each video, and then the videos are usually about 2 minutes long, which means 20% of your time is spent watching the same pointless insurance ad over and over. And a lot of the videos are clearly made for the purposes of Professional Development. Which means I'm trying to earn PD credit by watching pointless videos made by people trying to earn PD credit, and then my colleagues can comment on my post about it for their own PD. It all makes me want to sing "The Circle of Poo" from South Park.
Anyway, I ended up deciding to play with Pixton -- an online comic creator. I got to thinking about last year's BC Calculus class, and the fact that a couple of kids actually wrote down all sorts of bizarre quotations and discussions from class during the year. They ended up handing me a 9-page document of odd quotes ("Of all the things that equal mc squared, E is perhaps my favorite!") at the end of the year. I figure if we had a comics creator, the class would have enjoyed turning that into comic strips. This wouldn't in itself be so much educational, but if we were already doing a Calculus blog of some sort, the comics would keep people interested and entertained, and make the blog something that people might actually eagerly await updates on (assuming the comics got interspersed with actual content).
So, in that vein, here's roughly what it would look like. This is a somewhat cheezy first attempt at making a comic, but it worked fairly well for a first try.
I decided to pass over Skype, since I've been using Skype for several years, and "exploring" it doesn't really seem like something I need to do. Next up, I tried "TeacherTube" and was pretty unimpressed. All the videos are education related, but the quality and variety of education videos is far lower than what you get on actual YouTube. As far as I can tell, the only potential advantage is the usual complaint that YouTube comments are vile and horrible (which they are), but I'd rather use comment-circumventing technology than limit myself to the videos here. One note is that for non-members, there's a 30-second advertisement video you have to watch before each video, and then the videos are usually about 2 minutes long, which means 20% of your time is spent watching the same pointless insurance ad over and over. And a lot of the videos are clearly made for the purposes of Professional Development. Which means I'm trying to earn PD credit by watching pointless videos made by people trying to earn PD credit, and then my colleagues can comment on my post about it for their own PD. It all makes me want to sing "The Circle of Poo" from South Park.
Anyway, I ended up deciding to play with Pixton -- an online comic creator. I got to thinking about last year's BC Calculus class, and the fact that a couple of kids actually wrote down all sorts of bizarre quotations and discussions from class during the year. They ended up handing me a 9-page document of odd quotes ("Of all the things that equal mc squared, E is perhaps my favorite!") at the end of the year. I figure if we had a comics creator, the class would have enjoyed turning that into comic strips. This wouldn't in itself be so much educational, but if we were already doing a Calculus blog of some sort, the comics would keep people interested and entertained, and make the blog something that people might actually eagerly await updates on (assuming the comics got interspersed with actual content).
So, in that vein, here's roughly what it would look like. This is a somewhat cheezy first attempt at making a comic, but it worked fairly well for a first try.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)