iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Math educator Dan Finkel grew up doing math with ease and completed calculus as a freshman in high school. But it wasn't until he went to math summer camp and learned how to think like a mathematician that he truly fell in love with math. It helps to have a positive relationship with math because when people are uncomfortable with it they are susceptible to manipulation. (Think of predatory lending interest rates, convenient statistics to support a thin argument, graphs that misrepresent the truth.)

“When we’re not comfortable with math, we don't question the authority of numbers,” said Finkel in his TEDx Talk, “Five ways to share math with kids.”

"In a recent book, developmental psychologists and teachers discuss the best approaches to math education in the early grades."

Math is at play in every sphere of our lives, from recipes to internet security to the electoral college. But that reality can be hard to convey through the drills, static numbers and strict rules that make up so much of K-12 math education. Educators have made strides to engage students through math. One way to bring the subject to life, according to a math research organization, is through literature.

While no solution is even going to be perfect, the good news is that there are many digital tools that can be used in the Google Apps world on Chromebooks, PCs, and Macs, that help address the needs of math students and teachers. In this blog post we are going to highlight 21 such tools. They include Chrome Web Extensions, Chrome Web Apps, and Add-ons for Docs, Sheets, and Forms. In each case they add some extra functionality that is not normally available in the standard Google tools.

Hopefully these tools will help you and your students to learn and explore math more effectively in a digital world. Moreover, many of the extensions, apps, and add-ons will actually increase your students’ options for collaboration, critical thinking, inquiry, and exploration of mathematical concepts.

Smart videos for curious minds of all ages, a free resource for parents & teachers: Science, art, nature, animals, space, tech, DIY, food, music, animation, and more.

MathGames works on smartphones, tablets, desktops and in the last 12 months 2500 new schools have started using MathGames.com in their classrooms, reaching over 400,000 students. All of the content on the website is 100% free.

Parental engagement in any subject is key to academic success - some studies show a probability increase of more than 50% for children who are supported by parents in their learning to achieve top grades versus children who receive little or no support.

"What Was Google’s Original Name?  Think you know the answer? Click through to see if you're right!"

Math is at play in every sphere of our lives, from recipes to internet security to the electoral college. But that reality can be hard to convey through the drills, static numbers and strict rules that make up so much of K-12 math education. Educators have made strides to engage students through math. One way to bring the subject to life, according to a math research organization, is through literature.

“Mathematics is very creative and playful and joyful," says Kirsten Bohl, a spokeswoman for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. "Books connect with that sense of wonder and imagination and creativity.” 

To spotlight such books, MSRI created the Mathical Book Prize in 2015. Each year a panel of librarians, teachers, mathematicians and early childhood experts selects winners and honor books in five age categories. This year’s picks brings the full Mathical list to more than 50 titles that cross genres and formats, including picture books, graphic novels, biographies, and young adult novels.

What matters most, according to Jordan Ellenberg, co-chair of the selection committee, is that the books succeed in communicating mathematical ideas or problems and also succeed as great books.

Test scores, school report cards and Facebook posts complaining about homework problems often drive critiques of how math is taught in schools.

Amid the debates, it has become increasingly clear that one ingredient is necessary for success: opportunities for students to talk about math. Unfortunately, these are often lacking in U.S. classrooms.

We are both math education researchers. While we focus on different levels of the K-12 span, a common theme across our work is the role of talk in math classrooms – what talk can sound like, how talk impacts student learning, and how teachers can support math talk.

Want to support your student’s understanding of math? Talking will play a critical role. And a good place to start is to talk about math yourself.

“How was skiing?” I asked my 14-year old daughter as she hauled her boot bag into the car. “Well, the ratio of snow to ground was definitely low,” she replied, adding that she had tried to figure the ratio of snow-to-ground during practice but had received only mystified looks. “Stop the math!” demanded a coach. “You are confusing us!”

Why do smart people enjoy saying that they are bad at math? Few people would consider proudly announcing that they are bad at writing or reading. Our country’s communal math hatred may seem rather innocuous, but a more critical factor is at stake: we are passing on from generation to generation the phobia for mathematics and with that are priming our children for mathematical anxiety. As a result, too many of us have lost the ability to examine a real-world problem, translate it into numbers, solve the problem and interpret the solution.

Several years ago, former fourth-grade teacher Tracy Johnston Zager took an informal survey of two groups of people to find out how they feel about math: mathematicians and teachers who teach math. She discovered that while mathematicians used words like “beauty” and “wonder” to describe math, teachers recalled “dread” and “fear.” These words aligned with what Zager had observed in her job mentoring student teachers who expressed similar reservations about math. Teachers’ sentiment toward math is noteworthy because research has shown that adults can transfer anxiety to kids.

As teachers try to improve how they teach math by applying numeracy, inquiry-based learning, productive failure and complex instruction, the idea of how to become better math teachers is gaining a wider audience. But Zager writes in her book, “We moved right into a new way to teach math, without addressing teachers’ personal histories with and understanding of mathematics.”

A Regina high school teacher is using the international smash hit video game Minecraft to teach his students math.

"I was inspired by my own kids — seeing them play Minecraft and building things," said Dean Vendramin, who teaches math and photography at O'Neill high school.

Minecraft involves building structures out of blocks.

"It's almost like playing with digital Lego," Vendramin said.

When students struggle in math instead of getting the support they need, they often decide that they aren't good in the subject or that they aren't a "math person." Such students sometimes quietly slip toward the back of a classroom, stop raising their hands and no longer have the motivation to try. That scenario plays out in schools every day, but the sooner educators recognize that students are stuck, the sooner they can introduce new strategies to help students understand the concepts and stay on track. 

With math, teachers — especially at the elementary level — might also be revealing the trepidation they have for the subject themselves. As Education Dive reported in 2018, teachers who aren’t comfortable with math may also have trouble teaching the subject and may be projecting their discomfort to students — whether they realize it or not. Professional development for teachers then is important, to build teachers' confidence in the subject area so that they have the expertise to help students acquire the skills they will need to move on to higher-level math. 

Amy is usually a happy and enthusiastic student in grade five who loves to dance, but she is struggling with a tough math assignment. She doesn’t think she is good at math because her classmates always get the answers faster than she does and sometimes she uses her fingers to help her count. Even though her mom tries to help her, Amy is convinced she just cannot do math. She decides not to do the assignment at all since she thinks she wouldn’t do well anyway.

As Amy goes about her day, her experiences at ballet class, the playground, and gym class have her thinking back to how she gave up on her math assignment. She starts to notice that hard-work, practice, and dedication lead to success, thanks to her friends and teachers. She soon comes to understand that learning math is no different than learning any other skill in life. With some extra encouragement from her math teacher, a little help from her mom, and a new attitude, Amy realizes that she can do math!…

As a middle school math interventionist, the students who enter my classroom have already given up hope that they will ever be successful with math. I bet there are many other teachers out there who have this same problem! Since I deal with this problem every day, I have tried lots of different methods, but these are the top five practices that make the biggest impact for the students in my classroom.

As if LEGOs weren’t enough of an awesome childhood toy, one teacher has found another awesome educational/developmental use for this super-toy – as a math education aid! Alycia Zimmerman, a 3rd-grade teacher in New York, uses them to explain fractions, squares and other mathematical concepts.

“In the classroom, the tiny bricks are now my favorite possibility-packed math manipulative,” she writes in an article for Scholastic that goes more into depth about these bricks’ potential uses.

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.

Math is a subject that brings out anxiety in kids and adults. Talking through math's usefulness and being clear about why a math concept matters could help students enjoy the subject.

As if LEGOs weren’t enough of an awesome childhood toy, one teacher has found another awesome educational/developmental use for this super-toy – as a math education aid! Alycia Zimmerman, a 3rd-grade teacher in New York, uses them to explain fractions, squares and other mathematical concepts.

“In the classroom, the tiny bricks are now my favorite possibility-packed math manipulative,” she writes in an article for Scholastic that goes more into depth about these bricks’ potential uses.

Math teachers of older students sometimes struggle to get students to explain their thinking with evidence. It's hard to get kids in the habit of talking about how they are thinking about a problem when they've had many years of instruction that focused on getting the "right answer." That's why educators are now trying to get students in the habit of explaining their thinking at a young age. The Teaching Channel captured kindergarten and first grade teachers pushing students to give evidence for their answers in situations where there are several ways to think about a problem.

It’s time we create learning environments that make mathematics accessible for all students

“But I’m just not a math person.”

We’ve all heard this refrain—and possibly even echoed it ourselves. As a young student, I felt this way for many years. For some reason, math just never clicked for me. My 11th-grade math class with Mr. Peterson changed all that. Why was his class different? He worked hard to bring us examples of math in the real world, connecting concepts back to our lives and making them feel relevant and accessible to us. He gave us voice and choice in our learning, and it made all the difference for me. I can only imagine how much my confidence and enthusiasm for math could have been changed had I experienced a similar instructional approach in all the grades prior.

I’ve come to understand that there is no such thing as a “math person,” and that high-quality math instruction is key to helping learners shed that perception. We know from decades of research that success in mathematics is more linked to opportunities to learn in a meaningful way than to innate intelligence, and we know that effective educators can nurture mathematical abilities in all students.

I recently spoke to the mother of a 1st grade student who told her mom that she was bad at math because everyone in the class could answer so much more quickly than her. Heartbreaking. Six years old and already feeling that she is a failure at math. It got me thinking about what instructional shifts are needed in our math classrooms to de-emphasize speed in math and place more of an emphasis on reasoning and understanding.

At last count, there were over 80,000 educational apps available to teachers. There are apps for everything: literacy, STEM, productivity, audiovisual, etc. There are apps which improve accessibility for students with different learning challenges, i.e. text to voice, voice to text, etc.

While many of these may be a dream come true for educators, the dizzying array of choices is also a nightmare. Teachers just don’t have time to filter through thousands of apps to find the one that works best for the needs of their students. To help, we started to create curated lists of the best apps in a variety of education related categories. In this installment, we will present the best apps for kids age in the Ninth Grade.

What would happen if algebra instruction were personalized to fit students' career goals? Candace Walkington was recently awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to explore this.