I like the latest post from the Sargent Park Math Zone (Web Link) which is a classroom blog hub for grade 8 students (14 years old) in Canada.
What’s happening here is that Chris Harbeck is teaching maths through the medium of poetry. The students have been asked to create 5 poems describing integers. What’s interesting is that they have make their submissions via the blogging system through what are known as growing posts.
Basically a growing post is simply a single blog post whose content is repeatadly edited and modified until a final solution is reached. Now I really like the notion of the growing post – the fact that it can be used to produce student created content which is visible not only to the tutor but also to the rest of the class to comment on. I’ll be using this when I next run the Blended Learning in Higher Education module. Here I will require the students to create a growing post on a particular topic (probably relating to the Standards Framework) and ask them to leave comments on 3 other growing posts. When they revise their growing post I’ll ask them to post a comment summarising the changes they have made in the light of those comments left by others. Finally I’ll add my own comment.
