Student often feel that its uncool to be “friends” with your teacher. There is a fine line that can not be crossed, but I feel that if we were to create a space such as a facebook math league page it would be part of the classroom environment. Our students would learn to become fans of the topic we teach and motivate to learn more. Online network sites help students feel comfortable and they bring a different perspective to the subjects we teach.

The obstacles I foresee in the middle school(where I teach) is that parents may not want their children on these sites because of the dangers of different predators. Moreover the lack of technology in the home is an obstacle and access to the technology in the classroom is another obstacle.

Making the communication that does occur much shorter than it used to be (for example, twitter only allows 160 characters per post) may have some negative impacts. In the past, writing a letter that had to be mailed was only worth the trouble if it was at least several paragraphs long. With the quick exchanges that occur now, there is no longer a need for complete sentences or even writing in paragraphs. I can’t imagine how these brief exchanges will ever improve a student’s writing ability. It is important for them to still practice writing traditional pieces, as you need to be a competent writer for nearly any profession.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/health/13klas.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=multitasking&st=cse

Our students learn while and by multitasking. In my opinion, there is a definite relationship between the way a student multitasks and learns. Multitasking and the multimedia bombardment which accompanies it, perhaps unwittingly addresses the different modalities/multiple intelligences, and the way a student learns. We are encouraging and support multitasking when we ask students to do more than respond at Bloom’s lowest level, when we ask them to blog, or create almost anything which is technology based. Yet, from my observations over the years, it seems that the students learn the process of multitasking more rapidly and more thoroughly than the content they are supposed to learn. Hmmm. Does that mean we have to go back to a more traditional academic environment, if we want students to learn at a faster pace? Do we, once again, need to adjust our teaching methods. There is an interesting article on how well students learn when multitasking in the October 13, 2009 issue of the New York Times.

I am multitasking as I write this, participating in a superintendent’s conference day program on working with the ESL/LEP/ELL student population. I look around the auditorium. Almost every other faculty member is working on secondary materials as well (multitasking). There are several working on grading papers, others are playing games on their personal communication devices, almost all accompanied by a security blanket of caffeine. Yet, while they are doing this, they are also whispering, discussing the information being presented to them by their colleagues in the front of the room. In the old days, say, ten years ago, it would have been considered extremely rude, and there are still people who would consider it so. Ten years ago, when I was teaching HTML at Mount Saint Mary College, I fought a battle trying to keep my students from running background programs during class. The students would have several programs open in the background. These programs were usually Napster, AIM, and email. My reasons for wanting the programs closed were two fold—The first was that I felt they were not paying attention to the materials I was presenting in class, and therefore, not getting what they were paying for. The second, was that the programs were eating computing power, and that was needed for what I was teaching. I lost the battle. It took three years, before I realized that if I left them alone, and did not waste class time playing cat and mouse, trying to get them to shut down, that they were giving me the same amount of attention while they were multitasking, as when they weren’t. In fact, at times, I felt their attention was more intense, because they were taking in the information in blocks. Since as teachers, we tend to repeat, both verbally, and in presentation, the students would hear or see the new material once in the modality they use to learn it, and tune out everything else until new material was presented. The students questioned authority, but they also had the answers or solutions. It was up to me to make the change.

That leads into a question about employing differentiation in the classroom—If we differentiate/multitask, and we present using multiple approaches, how much time do we lose, and how much student attention do we lose, until everyone in the class gets “it”? Possible solution—smaller classes and creating classes where the student learning styles match the teacher’s teaching style. Otherwise, we run into issues of fairness from a student perspective. If we allow all students to multitask, and some are successful and some are not, what do we do when the students who can’t deal with multitasking insist they have the right to do it because the rest of the class is doing it? On the other hand, what happens when the more successful students seek the right to do the “easier” work because it will give them more time to multitask?