Utilizing Blogs in the Classroom

How can I use blogs in my high school math classroom?

Since I don’t have any computers in my classroom, most of what I would incorporate would have to be done outside of class time as assignments or projects. I like the idea of creating a class portal as described on page 21 of our course text. “In this vein, a great entry point for Weblog use is to build a class portal to communicate information about the class and to archive course materials. From a teaching standpoint, having a place to publish the course curriculum, syllabus, class rules, homework, assignments, rubrics, handouts, and presentations makes a Weblog a powerful course management tool” (Richardson, 2006). Since I have never used blogs before, I think this is a good place to start and not only will it help inform students and parents, I could even have the students help create and update it so that they were not just receiving and using the information but they were involved in designing and making it.

I would also like to incorporate a collaborative space where students can each add information which by the end of the year could result in the creation of a useful resource around a particular theme. One idea I had about a theme is math in the real world. I feel like a huge part of my job as a math teacher is showing the students the connection and importance of math to their lives because they usually don’t see why the need to learn it, especially high school math. Instead of me feeding them examples, I think it would be great to have the students do the research or stumble upon them on their own. As they are discovered, students could post them on the class blog that could be called something like, “I Found Math………”. They would have to give a full explanation and the specific area of math it relates to. This may take a little research on their part to find the proper math terminology. They should even include links to more information they found on the internet. They could mention math they have come across in their daily lives, on the news, jobs that involve math, or even interesting trivia type math found in movies or TV. A great example I like to use is a quote from the Wizard of Oz. When the scarecrow gets his brains at the end of the movie, he starts reciting a statement about triangles. In case you don’t have the entire movie memorized like myself, he says “The sum of the square roots of any 2 sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side”. Now a student might recognize that it is math and want to post it to the blog. They may or may not need to look it up to be able to say that it is the Pythagorean Theorem, or I should say supposed to be, this is actually an incorrect math statement and I would be overjoyed if my students were able to find this one and notice the mistake. It would be great to watch the list of items on the blog grow over the course of the school year and read reactions and comments from others. Maybe other people from outside our class would add a few interesting places where they found math or maybe we could solicit people in math careers to share their experiences with us. I think it would help my students make connections and realize the importance of math or like the scarecrow mess up, it could just be an interesting trivia fact. It would be great if it could also help students beyond our classroom that read our blog.

References
Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wiks, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.