Mathematics Journals - A year on

About a year ago, I wrote this blog post about keeping Mathematical Scrapbooks and in the mean time I have also posted this about Mathematical Communication. A year on from that first post I am reviewing a year of having played with the idea and thinking about how to push this forward into next year. I started a good debate with one of my colleagues about this and, as so often, I am left with a bunch of questions rather than answers - for now - realted to waht I am hoping to get out of this exercise. So, as a reminder, the following is what I was hoping that students could get out of the experience of keeping journals, in no partocular order.....

• Keep less of what we do but make what we keep more useful all round
• Encourage students to comuunicate about mathematics
• Provide a good exercise in review - making it
• Provide an excellent resource for revision - looking back at it
• Include lots of images and photographs that promote the idea of episodic memory.
• Students to keep something as a record of their maths that is something they take real pride in
• To have something more concise to show parents as a record of their work
• To engage students on a diferent level
• .......

So as I go forward with this and following the debate I started with my colleague, I have the following questions...

• Is this task suited to some students more then others?
• Who, how and why?
• Does this task offer benefits for all students?
• If no, then who could do without it and why?
• What other tasks that take place in my classroom or in the teaching and learning of maths could I ask these questions about

At some point I will need to commit to writing what answers I am giving to these questions and what progress I think was made against the aims set out above.