Maria Knee

We talked about Logo programming language and math in the elementary classroom with our guest Colleen King.

• Maria shared her background with Logo and Roamer robots in her kinder class, and her connections with Colleen who runs an after school Math Group and the Math Playground web site
• Colleen described about how programming and programming robots can be used to teach mathematics in a way that is fun and gets to standards
• There was a discussion about Second Life and how promising this could be for math instruction with children.
• Colleen talked about the need for not just interactive but open-ended math games that don't have just one right answer
• We finished with an interesting discussion about manipulatives, and how Colleen and Maria's thinking about online manipulatives had changed over time from negative to positive.

This week Lisa, Maria, and Sheila are joined by Brian Crosby for a discussion on taking simple lessons and using them to break down the walls of the classroom.

Our topic for Conversations this week was EarthCast09 which led to a discussion about broadcasting live with students. Sheila shared her experiences in broadcasting with her 7th grade students during EarthCast08. Matt Montagne joined us near the end of the hour to talk more about Earthbridges and EarthCast09 and his students' work with Gator Radio. The chat room was filled with discussion as usual so be sure to check that out too. Please visit the EarthCast voicethread and leave your comments.

Have a listen as the It's Elementary team is joined by fellow ETT webcaster Lisa Parisi as we discuss the use of Interactive Whiteboards and the changing landscape of education.  Welcomed New ETT listeners via the power of our twitter network. 

In this conversation we focused on the type of student we are creating in our classrooms where we empower them to be in control of their own learning. We discussed what this means when these students leave us and go to another classroom where this does not happen.