My New Addiction ---> Flipgrid

     Like many of us, I was searching for ways to connect with my class during a pandemic. Worried about how I would teach both digital and in person at the same time. Even more, as a person who loves formative assessments as a way to judge where my students are and as someone who wants to genuinely know about their students this pandemic left me scratching my head.     

    I am not one of those teachers who mandate that I see my students faces on camera during zoom sessions. I personally believe that I do not know what is going on in my students home and do not want to make them feel uncomfortable in their own home life and situation. However, because I do want to see them and hear them. That I needed something that allowed them to control the narrative and also deliver to me what I was seeking. 

    And BAM, I found this webinar online featuring Stacey Roshan speaking about Flipgrid! In this webinar she spoke about how Flipgrid allowed her to do three things:

Create a whiteboard style video, with or without your face included

Provide 1:1 attention and support to students with personalized private video feedback

Create mini-lessons with voice and handwriting

So then I was hooked! I could see my students, hear them think and give them feedback! I had to tried it.

Which brings me to this video below, which explains the number one way, I use flipgrid in my class.

If you have any questions, please comment below or reach out to me here. Also let me know if you use Flipgrid and how you use it in your class. 

Formative Assessments: How to...

If you missed last Tuesday's Globalmath you need to go watch it here... Formative Assessments for Math Learning

Pam J. Wilson and myself spoke on a lot of good topics..

Here is the link to my part of the presentation so you can see what I used, but listening to the presentation is key as well.  Formative Assessments


I am working on a post that may take me a week because I write slow and have a ton going on about a comment that I made in the presentation that I believe to be true..

"You can't wait for the quiz to learn what your kids know. You need to know today."

This cause quite a discussion on twitter some people agreed with me, one didn't and asked what is the purpose of the quiz then and that my statement means that there is no distinction between kids of different abilities. Which is not true.

Which is not the purpose of a formative assessment, in my opinion  I will speak on that more in my next post on how formative assessments lead to summative grading. Bloom's Taxonomy and Marzano based grading, the use of Level questioning.

So I ask you guys, what is the purpose of a formative assessment to you?

My Fav Friday - Graphing Cartoons

 

My Favorite Friday  - Graphing Cartoons.

I first got into blogging by finding a website named Dan Wekselgreene, named exponentialcurve.blogspot.com. I have no idea on how I found him, but I did and it changed me as a math teacher and wanted to make me express my ideas as well.

One of Dan's best activities, IMO, was a comic strip lesson he taught on graphing lines since his students were still struggling with it. You can find the lesson here Language and Retention of Math Concepts

He had his students draw comic strips to express the different ways to draw lines, when slope is zero, b is zero, negative slope, etc.....

I look his idea and used it in Algebra II class. I used it in my Exponential Graph Unit. My students have to sketch exponential and log graphs and transform them and many of them struggle with the transformations, well here come in the comic strips to the rescue.

I had my students take them and graph 1 exponential growth, decay, shift up or down, and 1 shift left or right. Here are some examples

I plan on using this idea more and more to help my students with graphing and transformations since it is still a part of the Common Core Curriculum.

Start...Continue...Stop

I asked the question to a few of my fellow math tweets last week about what was one thing. They wanted to START doing next year..CONTINUE doing next year…and STOP doing next year. As you can imagine the response was to long for Twitter, but it got me thinking about doing a post on my ideas and hopefully others will follow suit :).

School is approximately a month away for my school district. Summer where have you gone? I made the blog post a few weeks ago about my dilemma evolving around the homework/classwork grade which amounts for 10% of my students’ grade. 

You can read about it and comment here: http://mathlete06.blogspot.com/2012/06/i-have-read-several-blogs-over-past.html

So I think I have come up with a better solution hopefully. There are two things that I would like to START this year.

The first one at my wife’s suggestion in conjunction with @druinok, I will attempt to structure my student’s notes better using CORNELL NOTES. 

http://statteacher.blogspot.com/2012/06/cornell-notes-in-math-class.html

I think a huge problem that my students had 1^st semester especially the lower achievers was note taking. Hopefully this will increase the ability of retaining info for those students who chose to use them.

The second thing on my start list is INTERACTIVE NOTEBOOKS, which is where the classwork, homework portion of the grade will come from, I hope!

http://infinitesums.com/commentary/2012/6/18/the-1-textbook.html

http://kalamitykat.com/2012/01/08/interactive-notebooks/

http://kalamitykat.com/2012/06/06/interactive-notebook-questions/

These are great places to start if you want to know more about Interactive notebooks to start. I plan on taking up the notebook during every test and basically performing a notebook check. I need to come up with a way to remediate this I believe so stay tuned for comments on it.

I want to CONTINUE planning my lessons using the best Math Lesson Formula ever and I didn’t need my district to waste 200 dollars on training! 

http://function-of-time.blogspot.com/2011/12/math-lesson-formula.html

If you just follow the steps prescribed by @k8nowak all your lessons will be great in no time! 

For me the STOP part is easy, I work best when under pressure, BUT I am going to attempt to start off good, staying ahead of the curve and finishing strong. Since I am teaching the same thing I taught last year I just need to tweak items instead of making whole sale changes, i.e., I make notes to problems I want of the test and quiz, but will write them 2 days before I want to give them and make copies first thing in the morning. I want to stay organized I start that way and then fall off. Let me know ur list either through comments, email or own twitter to @tbanks1906

The Homework/Classwork Dilemma

I have read several blogs over the past year that refer to the one thing or grade that most teachers hate and don’t feel like we get enough out of. The homework/classwork grade and even though I use a modified SBG to grade my students, I am still responsible for using this category as 10% of their final average. 

AS always the question is usually begged, how do we get the low level students to do homework and how do we “accurately” grade it.  I feel that this category should be an easy grade for my students, however I do not feel that should get a 100 for doing remedial tasks.

So what are our options to accurately grade this topic?      

                 

If you have been reading my blog you know that I am a big fan of relay races. Which is a cheap way to get kids to try a worksheet, without the task seeming daunting and it works great for classroom management.  I have graded these before, 25 points for each completed topic, I usually select four per section. This has been used as a classwork grade, but is it fair to grade these for current topics?

My wife and a co-worker are big fans of www.quia.com and http://quizstar.4teachers.org/, respectively. The pros to using these tools are that grading is easy, the quizzes can be done at home, and the students can be given multiple chances to get the answers correct.

The cons are, not every student has internet access (workarounds can be found but that defeats the purpose), and students can easily SHARE answers and in a lot of cases will.

When I first started teaching like many of my peers I did Notebook quizzes, not that I want to do that again, but they did lead me to this thought. What I have thought about recently, is making all homework multiple choice, except for a few journal/error analysis questions. Then on random days giving the students a homework quiz, where I have 6 versions and I ask for the multiple choice answer to 5 questions.

Therefore, Student 1 would have 2 minutes to write the answers to  1,3,5,6,7 and Student 2 might have questions 2,4,8,9,10. This only takes two minutes, back to the board warm-up, students don't have time to do the problems in class. So if they forget to “SHARE” answers beforehand it’s too late. A side effect to this would be if you are tardy to class, you lose out on the five question quiz and must turn in ALL homework when you arrive to class. So don't be tardy to the party.

So what are you doing in your class to motivate students to do homework and is it working?

Preplanning and the First Days of School

School has started for me, August 8^th to be exact. I was looking forward to starting school this year, I always am, but this year was different because I am at a new school, and I am teaching Alg II/Trig and Stats/Discrete this year.

I know some teachers always wonder what should I do for parents on registration and open house and we as math teachers always wonder about the 1^st day of school activities for our upper level math classes.

1.     Registration – For us this the day where parents and students can pick up their schedules, walk around and meet their new teachers. I usually have an about me powerpoint on the board, including such information as my educational background, how many years I have been teaching and any special notes. I also make small little supply lists and hand them to the students/parents. If you feel comfortable in doing so I tell my students that if their parents email me by the end of the first week of school they get 5 bonus points on first test. This gets me a lot of email address from parents that I save in my inbox folders for later recall.  

2.     First Day of School – Dan Meyer the high school math guru himself created a first day wiki a couple of years ago here is the link http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=324. I pretty much follow it 2 a T J

3.     Open House – I am working on something new for Open House this year. Last year I won a grant that included a HD Flip Video Camera. I am going to film me doing activities with the students first 2 weeks of school, have the kids do a what you need to know about our class video. Our procedures, rules, grading, etc… and show it to the parents on Open House. Open House shouldn’t be about here is my syllabus and grading scale. It should be to show parents what their child is learning and they can help the teacher in facilitating that goal.

4.     Emergency Sub Plans – Once again why re-create the wheel when someone already has keys to get us there. Here is Sam Shah’s post about emergency plans for Sub. http://samjshah.com/2007/09/01/emergency-lesson-plans/.

Atlanta = Snowed IN = CABIN FEVER 4 some..

The Metro Atlanta area has been out of school all week due to the snow/ice storm that hit us Sunday. My kids should be at home enjoying a nice winter break. Tomorrow makes Day 4 of not being able to go anywhere and the temperature is not expected above freezing until Friday. So this post has a lot to do with what I learned from teaching last week.

1) Inductive and Deductive reasoning can't be taught together. I already knew that, but teaching inductive reasoning last week reinforced it, because the students took the full period to realize that Inductive Reasoning is pattern based. Would love to hear better ways to teach it :)


2) Stop using book formulas if you can create something better. Kate Nowak did for Coordinate Geometry. She came up with her own formulas for slope, distance and midpoint. Her distance formula worked wonders for my students who struggled the most last semester. I can't wait to try her slope formula next year. The midpoint formula works fine as is to me.