Converting Interactive Activites to Digital (Blaugust 2020 #5)

I know many other #mtbos teachers are in this same spot: I have so many great and fun interactive activities. They all involve sharing and touching materials, and many involve moving around. I don’t want to just hit reset and do all textbook assignments and be boring this year, so now as I go through and digitize each unit of my INBs, I’m sitting with each activity I usually do at that point and asking myself “can I digitize this?”

I’m making the answer be yes. I’m getting creative and using all these new tech tools and making it happen. So I thought I’d share a few types of activities I’ve managed to find a way to digitize! Click the activity titles to make a copy of any of them for yourself. I’d also love feedback on the usability of any of them (did you find instructions confusing, could you figure out how to actually do it, etc)

1. Color by Number

This was actually part of the last unit Algebra 2 got to do last February/March before everything shut down, and this was a new activity that students really enjoyed for a quick practice. I wrote a blog post about it! So I was really into figuring out a way to color by number without having students share markers and crayons. I saw Morgan Stipe used the new Google Jamboard to do Sara VanDerWerf’s popular 100# activity and that gave me the idea that Jamboard might be the place to do this as well! I took some screenshots of my old printable activity and arranged them in a Jamboard page, typed some new instructions about submitting the written work for the problems via Classroom, and then started trying out the coloring part. I quickly realized that the “pen” and “marker” tools were not at all thick enough to make coloring in squares feasible, and the “brush” and “highlight” were a little better but I imagined a student doing about three squares and then not having fun anymore. The whole point of the coloring here is to be fun and for students to confirm their solutions, so I definitely didn’t want it to be that tedious. So I did the tedious part of creating a square from the shape tool and copying and pasting until there was a square over each of the squares in the image. Now, students just have to click on the square and change the color to “color in” the square.

2. Drawing Random Problem Cards

This particular activity is the Dicey Polynomial Situation from Big Ideas Math, but works for any activity where you need students to randomly draw cards. I like doing practice with an element of randomness in it because I always feel like students get invested with their “luck” in drawing “easy” problems or “harder” ones. They’re basically just doing repetitive practice, but because the problems are not pre-set it involves the student more in the creation and gives them an extra investment in it. I thought there might be a way to create a virtual deck of cards on some website and so asked the #mtbos if they knew of a way. Taylor Belcher informed me that such a site does exist, but my district is pretty heavy on the web filters and I won’t lie, I didn’t even end up trying to get to it on my district chromebook because I’m 99% sure it will be flagged as games and inaccessible to my students (even if it’s not now, it will probably get added before I could use it). Emily Sliman used Taylor’s suggestion to make a Google Slides presentation that revealed cards, and it reminded me of the Logarithm Memory activity I made last year (featured in this blog post), and I realized I could use that same technology to do this.

To accomplish this, screenshot or type or create the “cards” you want in a grid arrangement on a slide. Then you have two options: you can download the slide as a JPEG and then set it as the background so students can’t move it. However, this gets slightly compressed when you do it and in this particular case, blurred the image enough that it was hard to read. If you have bigger graphics or text, this should be fine. Otherwise, select everything on the slide, right click, and “group” it, so that if they move something, they’re moving everything together. Then, you’ll want to make the “backs” of the cards. I’m not feeling fancy, so I just made solid squares with the shape tool, but you could put an image on it by making a square and putting the image on top, then “grouping” again. When you’ve made one, copy/paste until you have one covering each “card”.

Instructions to students then are to choose a card by clicking on it, and pressing backspace or delete on their computer to reveal it. Once they have used the card, if you want that card to be reused, instruct them to click “undo” to recover it before drawing again. If you don’t want to reuse cards, they just choose another and proceed! Not perfect and not really random, but it works to preserve the feel of the activity.

3. Card Matching/Moveable pieces onto a template

This works for anything where students are usually putting pieces onto a template, or matching cards. This particular activity was originally by Sarah Carter used to practice using the box or area method to divide polynomials. Create a background template, then save it as a JPEG and set it as the background as described in the last activity. Then, screenshot any moveable pieces and paste them off the borders of the slide. Students can drag them where they go. Make sure they’re the correct sizes to fit into the template – although there is no way to prevent students from resizing them, if they just click on them and drag, they should be good to go! I made the first slide of this the instructions and each slide after that is one problem, but depending on the puzzle you may only have one slide that is the puzzle template. This general method works with Tarsia puzzles, matching, and more activities!

The screengrabbing, copying and pasting gets pretty tedious but you’ll get in a bit of a rhythm. Throw on a podcast 🙂 Something to watch out for if you’re digitizing an activity with moveable parts that was previously created to be printed and cut apart is that you or the person who created it originally may have typed out the pieces in order, understanding that they could be easily shuffled when printed and cut (that’s the case with this activity’s original file). So, when you’re taking screenshots and pasting them into the Slide, make sure to just not place them in order and mix them up a bit, since easy “shuffling” isn’t an option here!

4. Question Stacks

The practice format of a question stack is popularized by Sarah Carter, although I’ve seen them from many other sources as well, and you can find an instructional template as well as links to many of her stacks here. You can also find templates to make the physical paper version here from Math by the Mountain.

There are probably several ways you could digitize these, but I am going to use a rearrangeable Slides presentation. Students will drag the slides similarly to how they would stack the cards. This would be much easier to do if you were creating the stack from scratch, because all you’d have to do would be to paste a problem at the bottom of a slide, paste its answer at the top of a different random slide, paste the next problem at the bottom of that slide, and repeat until you ended with the last answer on the first slide you put a problem on. I ended up reworking the problems in this one that I had previously created to match up their answers to make sure I didn’t close the loop before the end. You could also use the templates to work backwards and figure out the order of your problems and answers. I decided to download each slide as a JPEG once I’d finished and set it as the background so that students wouldn’t try to move the problems and answers to different slides instead of moving the whole slide, but you could actually set it up that way if you wanted to. I’m also asking students to insert a picture of their work on each slide, but generally I don’t collect work when they do a question stack so you could skip that. The reason I decided to do it is since half my students will be doing this activity online from home, they could easily just share the chain of questions and answers with each other to get the slides in the right order. Requiring a picture of handwritten work, sure they could still cheat, but they’d have to share the order, the work, and the student would have to copy all the work to insert their own pictures, so at some point it becomes more effort than just doing the practice yourself.

I hope having some example activities helps you to translate your own activities to digital versions! Let me know if you have another creative way to replicate an interactive activity digitally!

Can we have Precedented Times? (Blaugust 2020 #4)

Today was supposed to be the first day of our district’s annual tech bootcamp, which is an awesome optional PD opportunity where our technology innovators and other teachers throughout the district present PD on various tech tools that are available to us for our classrooms. It’s incredible because you’re hearing about how this works for actual teachers in actual classrooms.

Due to the “unprecedented times” of a global pandemic, bootcamp was moved totally online, which actually became kind of cool because it could be live through Google Meets, but all of the sessions would also be recorded so people could watch at their own leisure. Also, they could remove the registration limit because an unlimited number of people could watch these online sessions. I think something like 500 people registered!!!

So why am I saying “supposed to” and “would be” instead of literally right now watching live tech PD sessions?

Yesterday afternoon, most of Iowa got another “unprecedented” event. A derecho! Before you go look that up, it’s essentially a land hurricane, or a tornado with straight line winds. There’s more specific requirements for what defines one but that’s the basics. Near our house we had winds measured at 90 mph. I’ve lived in tornado territory my entire life and I have never been so afraid during a storm. I managed to convince my cat to come to the basement with me and we sat. My phone wasn’t working, either cell signal or data, so I couldn’t contact my parents who had been driving home from visiting my sister in town or my boyfriend who was at work.

Luckily, our house appears to be unscathed and our patio furniture got thrown around the yard but is all still fine. Many others were not as lucky. We still don’t have power 20 hours later and the energy company has said this amount of outages compounded with trees down is “unprecedented” and they can’t even give estimates for when power will return.

So, the start of tech bootcamp has been pushed to tomorrow for now. Who knows if that will even be possible. I’m feeling lucky that my phone is working again and that we own a solar powered phone charger. That it’s not unbearably hot today and that my home is undamaged and that my parents made it home okay and my boyfriend didn’t even know anything happened until he sent me a text i didn’t respond to because his office is in a basement and they didn’t lose power.

Really waiting for something about 2020 to be precedented. Would love to tread some familiar ground. So anyways. That’s my Blaugust attempt for now.

Not pictured: our small charcoal grill that had been left out to cool down that DIDNT EVEN MOVE

We’ve had Ada only two weeks. I was so glad she actually came to the basement and sat with me.

I attempted to go on my usual morning walk on the bike path. Nope.

Handwritten Math (Blaugust 2020 #3)

After my vague planning post yesterday, I was asked by DruinOK to expand on how I’m using a touchscreen chromebook.

As any math teacher will know, all too often edutech tools that everyone is raving about just won’t work for our classrooms because it is very difficult to type equations. Even if there is an equation editor in the tool, it may still not work because showing the whole problem solving process is still difficult to type out.

So, when I realized that we would have to be doing most things online in some fashion (even before my district settled on a plan, I realized that passing around papers, getting up to turn things in, and all those typical activities were a no go for me personally during this pandemic), I started brainstorming how to address this issue. I have always been hesitant to go “paperless” because I don’t want to spend all my instructional time teaching students how to type the things they want to show up on their screen, I want to spend it actually getting them to understand how to do the mathematics. That’s still very true, but now that the “paperless” issue is kind of forced, I needed a solution.

Last year, I did portfolios for the first time. Not really self curated portfolios, although I may mess around with those this year more, but more like a time-released assessment where they did a few problems at various stages throughout the instruction on a standard but I graded them as a whole at the end of the standard. We used SeeSaw to do this (and sidenote that I loved using SeeSaw, but think I’m going to try the same thing in Classroom this year as I’m trying to limit the number of different tech tools students need to keep track of and we’re required to use Classroom) and I had students do the work on whiteboards and take photos of their work using the webcam on their chromebooks to submit. So that gave me the idea to use photos of work more extensively this year: you can insert photos using the webcam directly in Google Slides, so that will be part of their digital notetaking, and you can take photos on the webcam to submit in Classroom, which I’ll use for traditional assignments and the portfolio type assessments again. Haven’t quite figured out quiz/test assessments yet, especially the district wide ones, as there’s more of a security concern there so having photos saved on chromebooks may not be desirable.

So that kind of takes care of students. We will still handwrite things, which lets us focus more on the math, and submit pictures in a few various ways. But the other immediate thing that I realized when it was announced we were doing a hybrid model is that instructional videos would be a necessity. Especially since we are required to provide the same “lessons” to the group of students who are in the classroom on a given day as we do to the students who are online at home on that day. I know there’s Khan Academy and various YouTube channels that make these types of videos already, but finding one that is directly aligned with our priority standards and what our assessments look like is often pretty tricky, and honestly takes more time than just making my own would.

In the spring, even though we were doing voluntary learning activities and so mostly avoided making instructional videos, we did do a few activities that needed a video. I rigged up some interesting over the shoulder camera setups courtesy of my boyfriend’s collection of video and podcasting equipment that he has, and it worked out pretty well. But, I didn’t want to leave that all setup in our small house all the time, or lug it to school and have to continuously set it up and take it down. Also, I wanted a way to have students see my face during the video also, because I think that makes it feel more personal to them. Our district just purchased Screencastify Unlimited, which is very easy to use and will record a video of your computer screen while also recording your webcam down in the corner. So if I could get the math on the screen, I would be golden.

Which brings us back to the fact that math is very difficult to type, especially trying to work through an example live on video. So my immediate thought was a touchscreen. We have teacher chromebooks, but they aren’t touchscreen. I own a laptop that is touchscreen, but 1. it’s quite old and slow and 2. spring 2019 it decided that it didn’t recognize its battery anymore, so it only works when plugged in. Not ideal. I also own an iPad, but I’ve had it for 8 or so years and some research yielded the fact that no screen recorder apps are compatible with that version of an iPad, much less Screencastify which was my ideal solution.

So I looked into touchscreen chromebooks. I got an 11.6″ hp one for not too much money, and then literally the day I picked it up found out that our teacher chromebooks are getting upgraded to 15.6″ touchscreen models…so now I’m considering returning the one I purchased once I get my hands on that! (I have 30 days to return mine)

BUT, it’s definitely doing what I want it to. So here’s the content you all probably want to read after all of that idea rambling. I have already split up each of our priority standards for the courses I’ve taught before (teaching one new course one we start term one, but that won’t be until October so I have time to work on that) into small skills for INB purposes. My goal is to make <5 minute videos on each skill, with one problem example and any new information needed. Some of these skills will need to be broken down further to achieve that time goal, but I don’t think students will really focus on watching videos longer than that. These videos will be directly linked in their digital INBs to help them fill them out, and for later reference if they want.

I’ve totally done one (fairly short) Algebra 2 unit already. First, I completely made the Google Slides version of their INB which was basically just screengrabbing my already existing INB files and arranging them logically in slides. I downloaded this as a PDF. The PDF reader in Chrome has a pencil icon in the corner that lets you annotate documents, which is where our new friend the touchscreen came in! It actually has a good variety of pen colors and highlighter colors which will meet all my needs with it, and if I need a graph I just flip over to Desmos on my screen! I bought a pack of cheap styluses to write on the screen with, fired up Screencastify with the webcam embed option, did my makeup for the first time in 5 months, and pressed record!

Here’s what one example problem looked like after I recorded it live. It’s definitely a bit sloppier than my actual handwriting, which you can see the same problem here written in pen on my Rocketbook, but I’d almost compare it to my usual SMART Board handwriting. It might be better with a nicer stylus, but I personally don’t think that’s worth the investment.

You can watch one of the example skill videos I’ve filmed so far here: I think the touchscreen device is really worthwhile for this, especially if you can use Screencastify which automatically throws your videos into your Drive for easy linking to students! Even the free Screencastify option, you can make videos less than 5 minutes with.

I’m trying really hard not to get all perfectionist in the videos, to not start over when I say something weird or the pen doesn’t work for a second. To treat them just like my classroom where what I say is what I say. Obviously, if I screw up majorly and it makes the video unnecessarily long, I’ll do another take, but my cat jumped on the table during one yesterday and I just left it in there as a nice treat to the students.

A Plan for a Plan (Blaugust 2020 #2)

The title of this post is a vague reference to something our governor said in a press conference recently. Inspires confidence, no? (no.)

Anyways, here’s my vague plan for how to do this thing so far.

Kids have their individual supply kits described in the last post and their chromebook. We are basically doing online learning all the time, just they’re in the classroom sometimes. I have a Google Slides Weekly Agenda template that I made, which I’m sure will change a bunch when I actually figure out what’s going on (is that going to happen?). That will be the base for most things, it will get posted in Classroom weekly. They’ll find the day of the week at the start of each class or when they’re ready to work on math at home. Openers will probably mostly be responded to in Flipgrid or they may be directed to a puzzle that I’ve converted to an interactive Google Slide file, which will be in Classroom so they can each have their own copy to manipulate.

I’ve kind of worked out a plan to digitize my INB’s in Slides (example I’ve been working on), but I’m cutting the number of examples down so much for time. These will be in Classroom so each student gets a copy. Students can work examples on their “whiteboards”, then insert them into the notes by taking a picture with their webcam (you can do this directly in Slides so it’ll be easy to teach). I’m going to make short screensharing videos (my district bought Screencastify Unlimited so that’s really easy to use) using my new touchscreen hp Chromebook to annotate a PDF version of the INB Slides to explain the notes and do one example. This video will be directly linked in the agenda slide. I think I’ll teach this bit live to the in person students. Then I’m going to use my Rocketbook to link probably another worked example and just the answer to another example, which they can work themselves to check understanding. They can put these in their notes or not. This will also be directly linked in the agenda slide. Then there will be a short practice assignment or activity.

When I did more traditional assignments previously, I would post the problem set in Classroom (even if I pulled the problems from our textbook I would screengrab them or retype them so they could all be in one PDF because it makes my students more likely to actually do it), and depending on the course and content, also link a Rocketbook file of the answer key for them to check their answers. They would do the problems on paper and turn them in. So that will look similar, except they’ll do the problems either on paper or on their “whiteboards”, take a picture using their phone or webcam, and submit on Google Classroom. We all know math is difficult to type out, and I don’t want to waste time trying to teach that when they can just take pictures. This has some precedent because this was how I did their portfolios last year. These assignments and answer keys can be linked directly in the agenda slide.

I think I can digitize most of my more interactive activities into Google Slides. Question Stack/Scavenger Hunt type activities I can put one problem on each slide and then have a space for them to type “I came here from slide __” to show they put them in the right order. Or they could drag the slides to reorder them! Haven’t messed with that one yet. My more matchy/card sort type puzzles can be made draggable in Slides, like this Polynomial Naming activity from Sarah Carter that I digitized this afternoon. Students won’t be able to work in groups on this, which makes me sad, but it is what it is. These activities will go in Classroom and their name and category location will be described in the agenda.

Obviously our good friend Desmos is going to be a frequent guest star, and I can link those activities directly in the agenda slide.

I’m planning to set up a Flipgrid “help desk” page for each block and teach them how to make a short video requesting help on a problem or activity, and to check and respond to classmates with hints or answers if they understood the activity well.

With some of our extra in-person time, I’ll discuss common mistakes and field questions. Obviously I can field questions in real time from the students who are physically there, but we’ll have to address questions from the days they were at home.

Assessment is a whole different beast and I feel like we’re going to get more guidelines on that from the district/our curriculum heads, but I’ve been thinking about it a little. Another post, though. I have been using standards based grading the last few years though, where only assessments count towards their grade, which will be interesting to see if I can still motivate them to do the practice work, especially on days they aren’t in the classroom. And notes, especially since they’re digital and so more work. I at least have the motivation that I require them to do some of these things before they’re allowed to reassess. But as I said, that’s a different post. You may be able to tell from how many times I said “linked in the agenda slide” that I’m trying to make accessing the content and activities as easy as possible, because I know from experience that my students aren’t great at navigating Classroom and often just look at the thing on top (which I will make sure is the agenda always).

Anything from my list that you think you really like the idea of? Anything you see problems with before I try it? Let me know!

I Just Don’t Know (Blaugust 2020 #1)

Optimistically, I’m labeling this #MTBoS Blaugust post #1, putting the vibes out there that there will be more. We shall see.

2020 was a rough year for me even before the pandemic started hitting the US. In January, I found out my cat had lymphoma. We had to put him down at the start of March. In February, I found out about a ton of cuts and changes our district was making to our alternative school that I’ve worked at and loved for 7 years. Then, we all know what happened in March. I don’t think I’m the only one who has just sat in a chair and stared into space for long periods of time throughout this, or spontaneously burst into tears with no warning.

My district, like many in Iowa, opted to do voluntary learning activities after we closed through the end of the school year. Our math team was dealing with students in classes ranging from pre-algebra type courses to Pre-Calculus, so we did a lot of really cool and fun enrichment activities. Unfortunately, those activities are sort of more on the fringes of our curriculum and was kind of a different direction than teaching mandatory for credit courses would be. I really enjoyed what we did, and interacting with our students about some of the more playful branches of mathematics. I feel like it prepared me zero for what’s about to happen.

I don’t even want to get into the drama that is Iowa education right now in these blogs, but my district is currently set to start school in 2.5 weeks on a hybrid model where students in group A attend MT and alternate W in person, and group B attends ThF and alternate W in person. The other days they are learning online from home. We will be wearing masks. We are to use Google Classroom as our homebase (which is totally fine because I’ve been using Classroom in my…classroom for years now). We are teaching on a 4 block schedule, which is normally 90 minutes per class, but they have removed half an hour from the student day to give us a bit more prep time for our online materials, so classes are going to be….??? minutes long (we haven’t been told if we still have a separate MTSS period or what the schedule looks like yet). We are to use the same lessons for the online and in person groups on the same days, but only post ~45 minutes of work for our online students on any given day. I’m assuming that we’ll fill in the rest of the in-person time with questions and help, assessments and re-assessments.

So how do you do that?

I just don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything. I’m going into my 8th year of teaching, and like others have said in their Blaugust posts, I pretty much have to scrap my entire classroom. I’ve worked so hard to continuously increase the number of hands on, interactive, collaborative activities in my room over the past 7 years, and now those words are pretty much buzzwords for what not to do during a pandemic. I have used interactive notebooks for 4 years (? I think) now and right now the thought of passing out foldables and sharing glue sticks gives me an anxiety attack. My kids use whiteboards for absolutely everything, but I don’t want to share those. I have so many matching, cart sort, puzzle type activities that I now can’t use. How do I teach like this?

I’ve started to slowly problem solve. I’m making kits for each of my students to carry around with them between home and the classroom (many of our students have always left materials in the classroom and been terrible about bringing things between home and school and I guess they’re just going to have to figure it out). Each kit will have a sheet protector with a piece of cardstock inserted, that has a grid printed on one side to use as a whiteboard. They’ll have a dry erase marker, pencil (they’ll have to get their own notebook), part of a (unworn) black sock to use as an eraser, and a ruler. My goal is to get as many of the “whiteboards” and rulers back at the end of the term as possible to sanitize and reuse.

Oh, yeah, because we did voluntary learning to end last year, we’re going to have five terms this year instead of four, and the “0” term is going to recoup the credit students didn’t earn then. So I’ll have a group of kids for only 7 weeks before resetting to actually start this school year. What.

Oh, also, the alternative school was not on a block schedule last year but we’re being transitioned to one this year, so students don’t actually get all their classes from 4th term last year for 0 term this year? Because instead of 8 they have 4? Also we taught 3rd quarter of a year long class before school closed and only missed 4th quarter, but the other high schools in our district essentially missed 3rd AND 4th quarters because they WERE on block schedules? So I’m not entirely sure where I’m expected to start teaching?

Anyways, I’ve had a LOT of anxiety about just. Feeling like I’m going to be a bad teacher this year. On top of anxiety about getting sick, how on earth all this is going to work, etc etc etc

I started to type what my vague plan is so far and then realized that’s essentially a whole new blog post, so it shall be that. This is just feelings of uncertainty and sadness for what my classroom usually is.

Next post is the plan. The vague plan that will probably change next week.