#InquiryMaths: Mathematical Thinking meets #Social Leadership using #Seesaw

Social media is viewed as “entertainment” by many. However, many people use social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter to find their news -2/3rd to be exact. As I ponder this, I have to recognize what a powerful influence this is over our culture.  Social media as entertainment may be what IS, however, it doesn’t have to be what WILL BE for our children’s future. I believe we can change that. I think we can educate students to view it as an avenue to have true intellectual discourse and human connection. In Social LEADia, Jennifer Casa-Todd suggests that digital citizenship should evolve into using the internet and social media to improve the lives, well-being, and circumstances of others and I don’t think we have to wait until students are old enough to have social media accounts to begin to develop this mindset. So we have begun to test out this idea during our current unit of inquiry:

Language communicates messages and builds relationships

• Different forms of media (form)
• The way we choose to communicate will affect relationships. (reflection)
• How we can interpret and respond (causation)
  

During this unit, we have been using Seesaw as our social media ‘training wheels’ to explore what it means to consume content and respond to it by examining how we share our mathematical ideas through posts.  Our team had realized that students were posting different ideas of problem-solving and we wanted them to examine alternatives to their thinking. We could show the students these clips as a whole class and do number talks around them but we felt that allowing students the choice to select the ideas would help them gain independence.

So we started by explaining how you could find these great mathematical ideas in their journals.

Since we wanted the students to construct meaning, we didn’t tell them what they should post as comments, we just explained how you could show your response to listening to them. Those first comments became the fodder for discussion–Were “hearts” and emojis really helpful for growing ourselves as learners? And they also talked about how we presented our learning online. One student expressed a chronic sentiment: “Sometimes I can’t hear them speaking. I think people should listen to themselves before they post. ” As a teacher, I loved this observation which really has improved their presentation skills overall. As a result, students have naturally begun to articulate how they really wanted to engage better online.

Through the Activities feature, students can peruse and select math ideas that they would like to view instead of just going to their friends’ journals. This has also helped to spread mathematical thinking around. I can see students nudge one another and say “Hey did you so-and-so’s idea? Go check it out!’

Aside from developing “friendly feedback and helpful comments“, we have been inquiring into how we can interpret and respond to these comments. My partner created a few “starters” for them to get them thinking about the need to be polite whether you agree or disagree with the person:

• Thanks. I hadn’t thought of that.
• Wow, that made me think that I can now…
• Thanks but I disagree because….

Although we scatter these sentence starters around, it has been lovely to see them create their own messages, showing us that they have transferred the meaning and personalized it. Now we are at the stage in which we are encouraging and educating parents about how to make helpful comments and responses. It’s a bit hard to get them to “unlearn” some of the social media habits that we have as adults, so we get parent comments like “Love you boo-boo. Great work!” I hope that the students challenge their parents and ask them what they connected to in their post.

Since this is my first attempt at teaching younger students these skills, I am excited at how we can improve their communication skills through the use social media next time. However, I feel immensely proud of how serious they have taken their learning and their need to connect with their peer’s ideas. I feel confident that if we approach social media from this perspective, we can indeed shape and transform what social media can be like in the future.

I’m wondering how others have used Seesaw to develop these skills and what strategies they found successful. Please share in the comments below so we can all learn from each other. (: