Overview Edublogs Serendipity webinar – Maths failure? & Assessment with tech.

Introduction

The recent Serendipity webinar recording here was one of those where we looked at two topics. We had a full house of five to choose from very quickly. There was a tie between “Why do so many people fail maths?” and using technology for assessment. The consensus was to look at both rather than tie-break them. Both topics generated a lot of discussion through audio and text chat with many ideas on the whiteboard also.

The Session

We started with a look at why many people fail maths. A quick poll revealed that most of us did not teach maths as a named subject those teaching science or technology inevitably had aspects of maths in their delivery. Everyone had much to contribute either from their own experience as teacher or learner of maths or from their own children’s experience. We finished this part of the session with a whiteboard of possible strategies that might help to reduce maths failure.

MAthsFailWordleResizeFor the second part of the session we moved on to using technology for assessment. Again this generated considerable discussion with much sharing of ideas and current tools being used.

AssessWTechresize

The wide variety shown here suggests that we could have many future sessions looking at the use of these tech tools and strategies for assessment.

Links shared – this week as a “one off” I am including the links shared during the session. They have simply been “grabbed” from text chat and I apologise that I have not attributed the sharers, checked the links, or reviewed the content. Lack of time!

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/13/math_class_need/

http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/

http://akevy613.posterous.com/the-21st-century-student

http://philhart.edublogs.org/2010/10/12/is-using-the-internet-cheating/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF-d7xz7rvM

http://teachingcollegemath.com/2010/10/shifting-assessment-in-a-world-with-wolframalpha/

http://www.teachertechnologies.com/2010/04/some-thoughts-on-the-7-current-trends-in-ict-and-education-gary-putland/

http://cegsa.editme.com/

Conclusion

This was a great session with lots of interaction and much sharing of experiences and ideas. As often happens many of the ideas and strategies shared could easily become the basis of the more in depth “Fine Focus” sessions.

The session topics and link to the Elluminate/Edublogs Community Partnership Elluminate room can be found here and also usually on the following calendars:

Edublogs Webinars (scroll down for the calendar)

LearnCentral under Events or the Australia Series

The Educator’s PLN

Next Session

FineFocusSmall

Our next Webinar is an Edublogs “Fine Focus” session. This week in “Free and Easy” we will take a brief look at and compare some of the free, and relatively easy to use, tools (downloadable and online) available for generating quizzes, other assessment activities and content presentation. Join us on Thursday Oct 21st at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Oct 22nd at 1am CEST, 7am West Aus, 10am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room

In the Future

If you are a regular visitor to our webinars you will know that we alternate “Fine Focus” sessions on specific topics with “Serendipity” the unconference sessions where we choose a topic by poll at the start of the session. Sometimes the very fact of being asked for “hot topics” or other ideas for discussion or learning tends to make our minds blank. This has prompted me to start a Serendipity Wallwisher for topic suggestions. Please visit the wall and add your ideas for Serendipity topics so that we have more choices to consider. Some of these ideas might also form the basis for future “Fine Focus” sessions.

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