KidBlog Day 1

The group of 5th graders I set up to work inside kidblog has not been able to get started. So far I have only gotten 1 permission slip back. However, I have had more success with a group of 3rd graders that I set accounts up for today. The group of students I took for an intervention/extension block this afternoon where online playing BigBrainz on the computers. BigBrainz is designed to help the students gain and retain math fluency with multiplication, division, and addition subtraction. It is really a great game for the students to play. It is really fun.

As the kids played the game, I set up the accounts in Kidblog and posted a blog post that I wanted them to respond to.

"Welcome to kidblog. This is an experiment to get you thinking about math in a different way. I want you to post a comment to this post. On the first line I want you to answer this question 9 x 9 =.Press Enter one time and explain how you answered this question. You can’t show your work so I want you to talk about your work. What steps and strategies did you use to solve the problem."

They had just finished playing the multiplication component of BigBrainz so I wanted to see if they were able to relate the skills learned to a different problem. It is important to note the this is only their second session with the game so none of them had reached the 9 facts yet. It was an interesting experiment. 3 of the 14 students correctly answered the question but only 2 of those students was able to write out the strategy they used. I responded back to each student with specific feed back about what they wrote. It was quite interesting to see them switch gears to from doing math to explaining math. Even with the time issue caused by it being the first time any of them had heard of the program or commenting online I think it was a successful experiment with mixing literacy forms. The 3rd graders really enjoyed it. Now to get the 5th grade classroom rolling. We are going to attempt a different introduction strategy in the next day or two.