So I and every other teacher right now are scrambling to get ready to teach school online. Here’s a problem I’m grappling with that I would welcome your advice.
In my Geometry class, we do a lot of group problem solving on wall mounted whiteboards using problems from the Exeter curriculum. It is so helpful for me as a teacher to be able to walk around the room, see students work, ask them questions, give them feedback, and then return later to see how their work has progressed.
I’ve been wondering a lot about what this might look like online. We’re using zoom, and of course there are break rooms, and even a rudimentary “whiteboard” built in where students could finger paint their work. But the reality is, most kids will be doing math work with pencil and paper, and it seems like it will be very hard for me to see that work as it progresses.
My students have all gotten very used to submitting scans of their written math homework using scanbot each night, and this is a great tool for seeing what students have done, but it isn’t seamless enough to really be useful for students to share their math work as they are going.
Here’s what I want—I want an app that allows a student to take a photo of their work. When that student’s work is photographed, it’s added to our class, tagged by student, date and time. Then all of these photographs would be nicely presented to me some way so that I could quickly see a students work, or step through their submissions. It would be extra awesome if I could some how annotate or give feedback to a student’s photo.
This seems like it would be pretty efficient for a student who was working on math and had their phone next to them. They’d just open the app, take a photo, and the work would be there for all to see.
I know students could just hold their notebooks up to a webcam, or take a photo fo their work, air drop it to their laptop, and then screen share. There are also lots of ways to do this saving to Google drive and other such cloud storage tools. But all of these seem to clunky to really foster conversation about math while students are doing it.
Are there any tools out there I’m not aware of that could do this? Is there some other approach that might work?
