Week 5 - Collaboration is the Tool

After reading the article by Sean Capelle called "It's Not About the Tool:  Why Online Student Collaboration Should Focus on State Standards" I was thinking about my own classroom and how sometimes I get so exctied about the tool such as bloggs and wikis and other web 2.0 tools that I forget the actual purpose of using them.  There is so much push right now about connecting everything to the Common Core Standards.  This article really made sense to me in that we really need to have the standards guiding what we do with the web 2.0 tools as opposed to the tool guiding what we do.  I am always paying particular attention to ways of using the tools in mathematics.  I have found that most things can be easly worked into Language arts and science and social studies but it is sometimes difficut to work them into the mathematics. 

The common core standards for mathematical practice, states that students need to be able to create viable arguments and critique others work.  I think using this standard with one of the content standards could easily lend itself to a blog question that is very open ended in mathematics and students could give their answer and then back it up with the reasoning.  As I write this post it is giving me the idea of creating a blog for my classroom where the students would be given a question at the beginning of the week.  They would then have until the following monday to post their answer to this question with support for their answer.  They could then comment on one of their classmates answers.  This would give an avenue for students to meet this standard but also a fun way to do it.  It could also teach them how to be good digital citizens.  There would need to be a bit of tweeking as the project went along for the students who don't have access you would have to give them time in the day to complete this task and you would need to review how to write a good response, but it would be a great learning experience for both the students and the teacher.  I am excited about giving this a try at my school.  Don't forget to check with your technology department as far as what the students have permission already and what you need to send the parents to get their permission.   I will keep posting as this project takes shape and share our successes and failures.