Edmodo

During summer school this year, students accessed our Edmodo page to post assignments. Part of the fun (for them) was that Edmodo incorporates a social networking function where students can chat. All comments, though, were visible to everyone, including and especially, the teacher.

This forum for student-teacher interaction gave students lots of practice with communicating in a math language. As students work through math problems, they often skim the surface of learning, completing each task at a superficial level, but through extended exercises of writing and thinking about the processes necessary for solving problems (metacognition), they often begin to realize the deeper aspects of the task and how to apply them (Brutlag & Maples, 1992).

Above is a snapshot of one of the responses to a question, one from the student's early experience with math writing. One drawback--on the assignment page, students could not respond to any comments that I made about their work. However, the social networking side of it allows for you to have an ongoing discourse about math.

Check it out at www.edmodo.com

Brutlag, D., & Maples, C. (1992). Making connections: Beyond the surface. Mathematics Teacher, 85(3), 230-235.