So what’s the deal? The deal is that our students each took one math concept and had to find a way to teach the concept using one slide and animations. How would they organize their information? What is important to know when we add integers for example? Do we need examples? The students took up the challenge with great gusto, eager to show off their animation skills. We spent a total of two class periods giving the students time to create their masterpieces. Then they were pulled together as three separate PowerPoint, one for each section.
Now comes the best part. The PowerPoint was uploaded to the seventh grade math wiki, and each class had the opportunity to evaluate a peer’s slide. The criteria for the evaluation included:
1. Is the math clear and accurate, if not what would need to be done to correct the math?
2. Are the animations an enhancement to the slide or do they detract from the learning? If you feel the animations need to be modified explain how.
3. Are there any copyright issues? Are the images, words, etc. created by the author, or if images are they from the clipart database? Read carefully, is the slide in the author’s own words?
4. Based on the above criteria do you think the slide is ready to share with another school and then finally publish to the world in its present form?
The students are using the wiki to post their evaluations of the individual slides. Some sample evaluations:
“The math was done correctly but not very interesting or clear. It had no animations, which made it, as I said before, too boring. There were no copyright issues because nothing was taken from other site. I don't think this slide show is ready to share with other schools. It is too hard to read with the combination of black background and rainbow writing.”
“This slide was simple yet descriptive, but many of the examples were incorrect. For example -10-(-4) is not 14, it is -6. Also, some of the writing was unclear on slide 12." Just draw a number line if it helps you more. Also when you have a subtraction sign next to a parenthesis. You change the sign to addition and the negative number to a positive.” This was unclear to me because there was no example of a number line, and there should be a comma after "parenthesis" and "Y" shouldn't be capitalized.
There were no copyright issues, and I really liked your animations. I think you need to edit your examples before publishing.”
“1. The math is accurate, but there is one part I don't understand. It just suddenly went into another equation (-8+2=-6), and then it said that the answer to this problem was positive. Otherwise, the math was clear.
2. The animations were really great. They didn't take away from the slide, and they made it more interesting. Good job!
3. There are no copyright issues. Everything seems to be in the author's words-except for maybe the vocabulary. Also, it's not 'Oppisite', it's opposite.
4. I think that a little more editing would be helpful (see above), but I think that it will be very good once it's edited.”
As you can see the students took their evaluations of the slides seriously, and worked hard to give direction to their peers. As we continue to through this with the other two sections, it will be exciting to see how the students rework their original ideas based on peer feedback.
Why Do This?
From a twenty-first century learning perspective, this project encapsulates much of what we are trying to prepare our children to do. They needed to first understand the basic material to both make the slides and evaluate the work of a peer. The evaluation and critical thought process had to be focused on not only was the math correct but was it presented in a way that helped explain the concept. Finally, the students had to be able to offer suggestions on improvement. And they had to do all of this in a way that was sensitive to the fact that there is a human who created the work.
Additionally, Wayne, our math teacher, loved the opportunity for the students to write using the math language. Creating and evaluating the project gave the students authentic purpose for math discussions.
This is only the beginning for I see many good learning opportunities coming from our ability to present information in an easy to use format. I have added a link to the an example on authorStream. Enjoy.
Math 1
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