David, I teach grades 6-8 in the US. Effective teaching combines coaching, projects, collaboration, personal interests and lots of feedback. My vision is to add collaboration features so that Sage become more of a math environment for students. This means a few things:
1. Improve the interface so that students can explore more easily. This could be a dropdown box that lists all mathematical operations by concept. For example, there could be an "arithmetic group" with add, subtract, multiply and divide. There could be a "change representation" to convert among percents, decimals, fractions, and scientific notation. There could be a "circle" group with "calculate radius", "calculate area", "calculate circumference", etc. The "circle" calculations would only work if students have defined the necessary variable. Lastly, I envision a library of formal definitions. 2. One form of collaboration could be a built-in chat (audio or text) so that students can work together on problems. Students can chat with fellow students. The teacher sees all the chats to make sure that students are on task. The chats will also shed light on areas where students are confused. Sometimes, the teacher may shutoff the chat - possibly for an exam. The teacher may setup a chat between a student who understands a concept and a student who is struggling. 3. Math calculations can be saved in a "personal notebook". Students can annotate and reflect on what they did. Students can also submit a "personal notebook" to the teacher. Students could share a "personal notebook" with a fellow student so that they can compare different ways to solve problems. The teacher may want to provide a partially completed calculation or an incorrect calculation and ask students to fix it. Teachers could also provide a generic problem template and students "fill in" the numbers based on personal interests. 4. Thinking back to the operation "lists" in comment #1 above. The teacher could disable operations from time to time to force students to do manual calculations. 5. I think that it would be beneficial to have different modes so students can easily move between tables, graphs, and symbolic representations. 6. The math environment could be used between schools and between grades where a higher level teaches a lower level. Hope this helps. I have a vision in my head and this was a bit of a stream of consciousness. Thanks in advance for any thoughts! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
