Ms. P, in her fifth year of teaching, struggles to meet the individual needs of her small, rural math class. A large part of her 7th grade math curriculum is reading and interpreting graphs, as well as graphing equations. Her school is too poor to be able to afford graphing calculators, a staple in more affluent schools. In addition, given her small number of students, she has difficulty matching students of similar ability to collaborate as they learn.
Last year, for the first time, students were allowed to bring smartphones to school and connect to the school network. The school also has a number of laptops. So at a summer math education conference, Ms. P meets with a Special Interest Group of rural math teachers and, with three other teachers from similar schools, plans to leverage these technology resources to improve learning for her students. In her classroom, there are only two electrical outlets and she is concerned that it will be difficult to keep all of the devices charged. In order to make sure that electricity is not an issue, Ms. P plans to set a classroom policy that you bring your devices to school charged. In addition, she will assign students each week as "electricity monitors." It will be the responsibility of these monitors to check the laptops each day and ensure that they, too, are fully charged.
During the remainder of the summer, the four teachers share responsibility for creating a set of online instructional videos and accompanying exercise sheets for their math curriculum. These resources are organized through a shared classroom management system into a "mastery-based" learning system.
In this mastery-based system, teams of students work independently, with teacher monitoring and support, and learn the materials through the online instructional videos and exercises provided by the teachers. As they master knowledge and skills, they access assessments and record that mastery independently. In Ms. P's implementation, teams are encouraged to collaborate as they learn. Students collaborate through two-way video and messaging using the app, Fring. When the time comes to work together completing the problem sets, the teams work in Google Docs on the laptops while conversing with team members on Fring. In addition, the teachers jointly create a Google Docs-based tracking tool that allows teams of students to check off the skills that they complete, while keeping teachers and themselves up to date on the progress made through the curriculum.
At the end of each unit, the students are independently assessed using the quiz tool in their classroom management system. In keeping with the goal of encouraging skills of collaboration in all students, each student's grade on a quiz is calculated based on a combination of their own score and the score of their entire team. This introduces the element of "shared accountability," which is strongly supported in research related to cooperative learning.
An additional tool Ms. P takes advantage of is a graphing calculator app. These apps have the functionality of a graphing device, but at a much lower cost. In fact, Algeo, the choice of Ms. P and her team, is free. For those students who do not have smartphones, the similarly free Graphcalc provides the same capabilities at no cost and can be used on classroom laptops.
Ms. P finds that the opportunity to collaborate with other students, combined with the immediate feedback provided by the assessment environment, significantly improves the motivation of virtually every student to succeed in what previously had been her least engaging course.