Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Sentences Stems

Sentence Stems - Helping Students to Participate in Academic Conversation

In our mathematics classrooms we want our students to have engaging conversations that encourage students to think critically about each other's ideas.  When students think critically they must challenge each other's responses and ask for clarification.  Being able to participate in scholarly conversation is a skill that needs to be taught; it's even more difficult for English Language Learners (ELLs) who are trying to learn the language and content at the same time.  This summer while taking my ELL Part 1 course I learned about the use of talk stems that provide students with sentence starters for initiating academic conversation.

A poster like this, hung on your classroom wall can be used as a form of reference for students when they are working in groups.  Making reference and modeling some of these sentence stems would be very beneficial in classroom discussion.

Poster taken from: https://mrlhuillier.wordpress.com/


Sunday, October 7, 2018

Symbolab Friend of Foe?

Several of my students have been talking about the Symbolab website and Symbolab app for solving various math problems.  The site covers content in algebra, graphing functions, calculus, geometry, statistics, physics and chemistry.  Students can type in a problem or equation and pick from a list of solutions, complete with step by step instructions and explanations.  It is certainly a helpful tool when struggling to complete homework, but will students use it properly or simply right down solutions? After trying the Symbolab website for myself I have to say I'm impressed with some of its capabilities, however, I'm a little reluctant to recommend it to students because of the ads that keep popping up for dating sites.  Here is a screenshot of the solution provided to me when I typed  2x-y=8  and 3x+y=12 into the search bar. 

What do you think?