Web-based learning: Telecollaboration models to enhance mathematics instruction

The potential impact of web-based learning in school classrooms has grown exponentially in the past two decades. Web-based learning broadens the teaching and learning environment, breaking down the walls of the traditional classroom and allowing for the manipulation and global exchange of ideas and information. Additionally, these telecollaborative activities can create authentic contexts and problem-solving environments for learning mathematics. This paper introduces several examples of telecollaboration projects appropriate for school mathematics and discusses how these activities support the development of students’ conceptual understanding and strategic competence. These activities also demonstrate how the integration of web-based learning projects can effectively promote new paradigms and provide avenues for future research in the use of technology in mathematics teaching and learning. The World Wide Web (WWW), an exciting and radically different medium infiltrating American pop culture, business, and education, is also a powerful educational tool with teaching and learning potential that teachers are just beginning to realize. By allowing students and teachers to actively and interactively participate in the learning process, Web-based instructional tools can play an influential role in the teaching and learning of mathematics. One of the ways the WWW can be used in teaching and learning is through telecollaboration. Harris (1998a) defines three categories of telecollaborative activities: interpersonal exchange, information collection and analysis, and problem solving. Within these three categories, she identifies 18 activity structures that can be used to classify and describe the types of web-based learning projects and activities currently used in education. These structures range from “keypals,” which enable students to collaborate on a specific curriculum-based task via email, to “telefieldtrips,” which allow students to take virtual trips to places otherwise inaccessible, to “parallel problem-solving,” which lets students solve problems together and share their solutions and problem-solving processes. These activity structures have the potential to create authentic contexts and problem-solving environments for students, ultimately providing students with opportunities to apply their mathematics skills in a real-world context outside of the classroom. In this paper, we describe four examples of Web-based activities and projects that can be used in mathematics classrooms around the world. These examples span all grades and demonstrate some of the different activity structures of telecollaboration models. We conclude with suggestions for designing your own Web-based activity and a brief discussion of the implications for telecollaborative research projects. Collaborative Data Collection for Young Children Mathematics experiences that are appropriately connected to a child’s world establish an important foundation for early mathematics development. Important skills for young children (ages 5-8) to develop include gathering data about themselves and their surroundings and organizing, describing, and representing that data (NCTM, 2000). Children’s informal sorting experiences at this age help them to develop the skills necessary to organize data into categories. By allowing children from different schools to contribute to a large data set, telecollaboration activities give children opportunities to initiate discussions and wrestle with counting issues that are a part of data collection and analysis. One project appropriate for young children is the One Out of Two Homes in America Project (http://web.utk.edu/~awatkin3/appliances/default.html) designed by Allison Watkinson of SMG Magnet Technology Academy. It is based on a claim by the Kenmore company that “one out of two homes in America has a Kenmore (brand name) appliance.” To begin the project, teachers download copies of the Appliance Survey children will use to collect data on the brand-name appliances in their homes. Because the brand names are listed on the Appliance Survey form, children can simply mark the appropriate brands for the appliances in their homes rather than write the names themselves. After children collect their individual data, they enter it on the web site under their teacher and school name, where it will be added to data entered by other children in other schools. The web site’s pull-down menus make it easy for students to enter the data themselves: clicking on the menu choice that matches their individual survey