WCYDWT? Pinterest Style
Sometimes a couple of ideas come together to form a little flash of inspiration. I’ve had a Pinterest account for a while but not really used it personally or thought of using it in education. A blog post from Mark Warner got me thinking though. Pinterest is a social site that encourages users to create a virtual pinboard of images and videos taken from across the web.
I’ve been a great admirer of Dan Meyer’s efforts to drag Maths teaching into the 21st Century and the real world. He’s been campaigning with ingenuity against typical textbook Maths problems. Particularly their over abstraction and removal of any space for thinking creatively about problems and making links between the real world and the maths thats being taught.
Dan’s TedX Talk is essential viewing:
His latest post sums up a lot of these thoughts well:
Original image ripe for mathematical questioning and modeling.
Mathematical abstraction.
Textbook example cutting out the important process above.
Dan’s work in this area started with his What Can You Do With This? (WCYDWT) series. A photo or video provided on his blog for readers to suggest Mathematical teaching ideas, inspirations, questions. He’s more recently been churning out 3 Act Tasks. These start with a piece of media (normally video) ripe for mathematical abstraction and modeling and some expected lines of questioning from students (Act 1). Act 2 involves some carefully crafted questions and perhaps an additional layer of information to enable investigation. Act 3 provides a solution. Have a look through them, there’s some great stuff there.
So put these two bloggers ideas together and what do we have? A Pinterest board of Mathematical inspiration:
Pinterest Mathematics Inspiration
I hope this can be a great way to crowd source some rich mathematical resources. If we can build this into a library of visually arresting media surrounded by great questions and potential problems and solutions I’ll be delighted.
If you’d like a Pinterest invite then please let me know in the comments, equally if you’d like to be added as a contributor to the board then I’d be delighted to oblige.
Facebook: Hard-Hitting Safety & Privacy Assembly
I’ve been giving an assembly to every House in our school this week, with a focus on Safety & Privacy in Facebook. It’s gone down incredibly well with staff and more importantly students, so I figured it worth sharing. I’ve hit on some top tips to get pupils to listen on a subject that it’s oh so easy to patronise upon.
Let them use it
This began with a lesson with my Year 8 ICT class. We talked around how the pupils assessed a friend before they accepted a request, and about how they decided what to share and with who. We looked at how you changed your privacy settings. And then I let them onto Facebook. Being the man in charge of the filter helps here, instant engagement and proper discussions with pupils about their friends followed as we could actually explore there Facebook.
A disturbing discovery
Whilst discussing whether some of the boys actually knew their hundreds of friends we came across this young lady. 
She’d added pretty much every pupil in our school and hundreds of them had added her back. All with an account that only opened in July, and with a sob story about being a former pupils from 2009 who didn’t attend much due to family problems. I’d never heard of her though. And some digging showed she had never attended our school. Disturbing, but a great discussion point about how to block and report someone, and gold dust for an assembly. 4 out of 5 assemblies in and nobody has actually met this ‘young lady’.
Invade their ‘privacy’
I spent my Friday evening snooping in our pupil’s Facebook profiles. Many were left wide open and many had hundreds if not thousands of friends. I wanted to point out not just the dangers of people not being who they claimed to be, but also the idea of a digital footprint. 30 minutes going through your pupil’s profiles is more than enough to find some examples of them publicly embarrassing themselves in some way. I settled on some family photos of a popular pupil and another trying to be-friend a well know local gang.
Expose their ‘privacy’
The edited version of my assembly presentation is below. The dodgy profile that many of them were friends with was a great talking point, and shocked them into just how much a teacher can nosey at in their spare time has been a real eye-opener. I’ve had pupils coming up to me in the corridor all week telling me they didn’t realise what I could see. One accused me of invading their privacy, I simply replied that was entirely my point!
Make them think about their futures
After showing how easy it is to spy on them, they were hooked for the important messages about managing your digital footprint and the idea of potential employers, colleges & universities Googling them one day soon.
Share something back
I finished with an image of my own Facebook profile, with the new timeline enabled, and a discussion of Facebook’s desire to get them to share more and more in the future.
Top tip is to get stuck in there, generic warnings and shock stated videos like those from CEOP just don’t seem to have an impact. Exposing privacy issues of young people in front of their peers does.
Google Plus - Google’s next take on social networking
So Google have started releasing their new social product Google+ or Google Plus. And it looks interesting if a little familiar to Twitter & Facebook.
Of particular interest is their attempt to allow you to segment your acquaintances and share certain information with certain people via the ‘circles’ feature:
This makes sense - I’m often a bit uncomfortable with my mix of friends, colleagues and my Mum on Facebook and it’s not easy to share stuff with only certain groups. One issue with Google’s approach would appear to be that you can only put people into one ‘circle’ - not terribly realistic, my acquaintances are actually a messy Venn Diagram of circles! Perhaps this is possible - time will tell.
What I am excited about is the opportunity to use it with staff at school. We’ve been looking at a way of improving communication and sharing best practice. As we use Google Apps for all of our electronic communication this might mesh in quite nicely.
So all I need now is an invite - can anyone help?!, and to cross fingers that it doesn’t go the way of Wave (I’m less excited this time!!)
Source: plus.google.com
Assistant Headteacher from Manchester, UK. This is a space for my thoughts on education, technology and more. Has for now taken over from my old blog at www.mrstucke.com
