Skyping in School!

In my quest to include more writing in math, I've been trying to figure out a way to make it something fun...not an easy task.  Enter Todd Nesloney (@techninjatodd) and John Fritzky (@johnfritzky) and our tri-blog project.  I connected with these two on Twitter & was asked to do a quad-blog with them.  We were unsuccessful at finding a 4th person, so our quad-blog became a tri-blog.  The premis of our blogging will revolve around math (as we are all flipping our math classes to some extent).

Each week, one of our classes will be the "bloggers", where the students write blog posts.  We haven't totally worked out what the posts will be about...specific math content, what we're learning currently, reflections on how flipped math is going, etc. are all some ideas I've been thinking about.  The other 2 classes will be the "commenters".  They will read the blog posts and will then respond to them.  Our hope is that students not only think more critically about math (and are able to verbalize it), but also that they are more careful with their writing...after all, someone will be reading it.

This week the students got to "meet" each other via Skype.  The process of getting Skype to work in all of our buildings (mostly mine) was a bit of a process.  Luckily, my tech team came through with about 20 minutes to spare!  The whole day my students were asking questions and watching the clock.  A few of my kids were literally shaking with excitement.  Me?  I was more concerned about making a good impression & getting the tech to work!  Once the Skype calls came through, the kids did great.  They were asking some really good questions, and it did what we (the teachers) hoped it would do...got the kids excited about writing!

In all honesty, this activity was one of the coolest things I've ever done with a class, and I am very excited to see how it plays out this year.