Student Publishing

Great session today with my fellow teachers at PCMI on student publishing. We talked about tools for publishing student work and the various pros and cons for those tools. Within this context, it seemed that there were three subcategories to consider: 1) the object itself 2) the technology used to collect the object 3) the activity/structure to present/share the object. By the end of the conversation, I had collected some really exciting questions and some really exciting ideas.

Questions:
What is publicizing work?
Who is the audience?
Who is the publisher?
(students publishing for themselves, vs. for me, vs. me publishing their work for them, etc.)
What is the work that gets published? Problem, solution, answers?
Is it artistic?
Is the work best work or just any work?
Is publicizing work always a visual thing?
What is the right amount of info?

Ideas:
- “fix the problem” aka “math hospital”
- student created problems become class activities
- student created instructional videos?
- audio "posters"
- notetaking/secretarial role in discussions…post those notes (Give them as notes for kid’s binders? Post on class blog/website?)
- groups record selected parts of their conversations for grade, either for class or for teacher.
- give kids a microphone. could be that they actually talk live to some classroom somewhere else, or could just be a structure for the conversation. we have one here, to communicate with our satellite in new mexico, and even though we aren't amplified we feel like we're performing when we sharing our ideas
- Voicethread.com
- Twitter
- "On the spot" (kids solve new problem live)

Did I mention that last night I had one of those terrible dreams about school starting and there not being any board space and I hadn't prepared anything and ugh. I'm so tired.

PCMI is amazing though. Ya'll should all come.

oh, and ps. I am now officially tweeting as a math teacher? It's really exciting.