Many people who know and teach math might question how social media can be useful. Most “traditionalist” math teachers see math as an individual exercise to be mastered by doing more practice (on one’s own, no less). However, I have a success story with Math 9. One of the outcomes in Saskatchewan Math 9 is
SS9.2 Extend understanding of area to surface area of right rectangular prisms, right cylinders, right triangular prisms, to composite 3-D objects.
There are only so many examples of 3D objects that I could find (and create on my own) so I leveraged another teacher in my school division, at another school, to create more and novel practice. We created a hashtag, #nesdmath9 to communicate with each others’ classes and our students would come up with 3D objects for the other class to determine the areas of. Some of my higher end students even went so far as to combine this project with their shop class, and created their objects in a CAD program (Google SketchUp). It was a great way to communicate with and leverage the resources out there. Both myself and my colleague loved the experience and we are comparing our teaching loads year after year to try this again. So far we have not taught the same class in the same year since, but we both believe this is valuable for our students.
Going into this I was unsure of the results, as I identify as a more traditionalist math teacher however seeing the results has made me realze that Twitter is a powerful tool in education.