Teaching Life Update

Many of you who follow me online will know that I switched schools this year, for the first time in my career. I spent the first 8 years of my career at an alternative high school in a large district, which let me get a small school experience in an urban environment. Our enrollment was under 300 the whole time I was there. For several various reasons I don’t need to post online, it was time to move on after last year and I moved to a traditional high school in the same district, where the enrollment is between 1500-1600 students.

So far, I love it. Last year really dampened my spirits and had me pretty down on teaching, I won’t lie. I’m getting some of that joy back here. I’m teaching a yearlong Algebra 1 class, where we spend some time filling in skills students are missing and moving more slowly through the Algebra 1 curriculum, Algebra 2, and next term is my overload term so I will also have a section of regular Algebra 1. (due to our district’s financial struggles, every high school teachers has to spend one quarter of the year with no prep period, teaching all four classes. How fun, right? 😦 not)

There are a lot of differences here, but also a lot of similarities that people might not expect (or want to admit). To do a little compare and contrast:

Things I miss from Alt Ed life:

• knowing almost every student in the building, at least by face if not name
• students that know they’re on a “second chance” and are committed to trying
• small staff that has regular staff social events
• my friends on my old staff that are real friends, not just work friends
• being the only person in the building teaching a course, so I get to make all the decisions (other than district mandated tests) and have flexible pacing
• my little math department of 3 that always knew we could walk into each other’s rooms and vent, ask questions, or get ideas (and we all had the same prep time)
• all teachers committed to giving students multiple chances to show mastery, ready to try different techniques to reach a kid
• being able to meet with all of one student’s teachers and get ideas when they’re struggling
• students having a great relationship with building security and (relative to where I am now) low amounts of issues with skipping class
• very small classes allowing me time to work 1:1 with multiple students throughout the class period

Things I’m struggling a bit with in traditional HS:

• A big department where 3-5 teachers all teach the same class, having to stay together pacing wise with them, having to give and enter data for common assessments within 1-2 days of when they do
• Other teachers wanting to all use all of the same activities (mostly worksheets), and wanting/expecting me to share every activity I make with them personally
• Larger classes and getting to those students who need a bit more attention or motivation
• working with a coteacher who has much stricter compliance expectations in regards to classroom management than I do (we’re constantly discussing this though so we’re coming to some form of compromise)
• security just cannot cover the hallways during the lunch block so students don’t come back to class after lunch…
• more of the teacher population is very traditional and aren’t as open to standards based grading policies, revision and retake practices, are more strict about students not being allowed to use notes or formulas, etc.
• I have gotten lost in the building a few times, I won’t lie (There are 6 floors. It takes up like 3 entire blocks. The bottom 3 floors aren’t below the top 3, they’re down a hill. It’s a wild building)
• there are very much still at risk students here and they need support and some staff members are not open to this being a thing, want to blame it on students for not working hard enough, etc.

Things I’m loving in traditional HS:

• wider variety of students – not all at risk students! but still some of those exact same kids that need that extra love and attention. But also some that like, have a college plan already and just do their work without hand holding and complaining and frustration, are involved in multiple activities, have well rounded cultural experiences
• getting to be part of the culture like sports and music and homecoming and theater and hearing about all the cool non academic things my students like
• having more teachers to ask for resources when I need to fill in gaps
• more administrative organization (because there’s actually an admin structure not just a principal and some ill defined support roles) and communication
• charity drives and events (most students at my alt. school needed the support of some of these things so it felt weird to hold them as a school)
• big staff events with booster funding, etc.
• not necessarily knowing the person all my students are dating (lol, but really, sometimes it’s better to only know half of a couple)
• not feeling like every single student in the building is my personal responsibility

Things that are the same:

• The teens are great. The teens are so great. They’re funny, they’re smart, they have a wide variety of fascinating interests, they’re on the whole more tolerant than most adults, they want to correct injustices and improve the world around them and want things to be fair and equal.
• some students have a great deal of trauma from various sources and need our support
• teachers don’t have enough time in our days
• teachers have to do way too much paperwork because no one trusts us to do our jobs correctly if we don’t fill out a form
• I continue to find things I can do better
• Most days I feel like I’m a decent teacher
• most of our PD meetings could be emails
• did I mention the kids are great?
• but freshmen are kind of destructive and leave a whirlwind of pencils, papers, and trash on the floor EVERY. DAY.
• upperclassmen are annoyed by freshmen
• I still am not interested in looking into any other job

So I guess that’s where we’re at. Overall, I’m glad I made the move. Some days I am overwhelmed with sadness at the community I left, but the truth is that I will always have that community because they’re part of me. I was so lucky to fall into the staff that I got to be on from about 2014 – 2018, and I know that it is pretty unlikely I’ll ever find a school like that again. This community so far is pretty great, and it’s ok if they’re just work friends, I think. I feel like I can share my opinions and my knowledge and at least be heard. Maybe I’ll find myself back in alternative ed someday, or maybe I’ll just keep finding the kids who fell through the cracks in the traditional system and giving them a little extra of my time and care, because they need someone too.

Activities to Make Students Check their Solutions to a Solved Linear Equation (free downloads)

I am still here, everyone….maybe a teaching life update is in order soon.

Quick share of a resource that I adapted! I am teaching a year-long block Algebra 1 class this year. So, these students need extra support, mostly because they did not do well in 8th grade math, or maybe 7th grade. Some of them were online students last year and didn’t do much of their work. The way we have it set up is that quarters 1 and 3 are an “Algebra Lab” course, where we work on missing skills and get a head start on the first Algebra 1 standard for the next term, so we can move a bit more slowly. Quarters 2 and 4 we work on the Algebra 1 standards, so they’ll have their full Algebra 1 credit by the end of this year. It’s going well so far. Most of the students seem to be appropriately placed.

But, we’ve started the first Algebra 1 standard of solving linear equations, and almost all of them refuse to check their solutions once they’ve solved, because “that’s too much”. This means that they are a) not really understanding what their solution means or if it makes sense and b) missing points on assessments that they could probably fix pretty easily if they realized they were wrong.

Magic Square Activity

So I was searching for some sort of activity that would force them to check their solutions somehow, and I stumbled upon this Magic Square activity by Katherine Sims. Her activity looks great, and you could totally just use hers. However, my students hadn’t gotten to equations with variables on both sides of the equation yet, so it wasn’t going to work for us.

I decided to just adapt it and rework her equations that had variables on both sides, so that they didn’t, and retype up the activity. Here is my version – the equations may have like terms or distribution, but all the variables are on the same side of the equation. I put this in dry erase pockets, so students solved the equations on their desks with dry erase marker (there isn’t a lot of space on the sheet itself to do this) and then just wrote the solution in the Magic Square.

This forced them to check their solutions, because they got VERY frustrated when they solved all 16 equations and then discovered their row and column totals didn’t match! Most students at that point went back and substituted their solutions back in to find which ones were incorrect.

Sum It Up Activity

I decided to follow this idea as we did move into solving equations with variables on both sides of the equation. I have an activity I use with my Algebra 2 students when they solve exponential equations called “Add Em Up” where they do a set of 4 problems and are given the total of all the solutions to those problems, so they can see when one or more of their answers are wrong. I searched for a similar activity for solving equations and couldn’t quite find what I wanted, so I made my own. Here is Solving Equations Sum it Up!

Looking back, I could have made this activity for variables only on one side of the equation, and just used Katherine’s original activity for the Magic Square, but that kind of logic hasn’t been where my planning brain is going this year so far…

There are six sets of 4 problems, labeled A through F. I printed these on bright green paper and hung them around my room. I had my students working in groups of 2-4 students. Each group got a copy of the record card, and then sent a representative to one of the green sheets to copy down the four equations. When they came back to their group, they divided the work up however they chose and solved the 4 equations. Again, most of my groups quickly learned that the easiest thing was to check your solution using substitution as soon as you solved it so that you weren’t waiting for the other solutions only to find out that the total didn’t work out!!

When they had all 4 solved and adding up to the correct total, they called me over and I put a sticker over the challenge they had completed on their record card. They turned in the record cards when they’d completed all 6 challenges so I could give them practice credit for the activity.

I am really hoping that these two activities convinced some more of my students to check their solutions when they solve equations. Hopefully they are helpful to you if you’re having the same issue!

Law of Large Numbers Simulation Exploration Activity

The concept behind the Law of Large Numbers is one that our brains struggle to come to terms with. It just doesn’t naturally sit in our heads. I have seen many curricular materials that introduce this Law with applet simulators that do some repetitive chance task, like rolling dice or flipping a coin, hundreds and hundreds of times in the blink of an eye. They are GREAT to illustrate the point, BUT.

Just the other day I had a student talking to me about his DnD game and how he needed to get some D20’s and other non-standard dice so that he could stop using virtual dice because they were, and I quote, “less random”. Of course we then had the discussion that the virtual dice are actually programmed to be just as random as you rolling a physical die, but the point is that our students’ brains do not think that! So, when you use the applet, they’re like “cool illustration, bro, but my brain knows what happens when you REALLY flip a coin.” So much of the Probability and Statistics curriculum is this little fight against our brains.

So I decided to come up with a physical way to illustrate the Law of Large Numbers, in the hopes that my students’ brains would be more accepting of the results if they had physically interacted with the probabilistic material. I’ve used coin flipping labs in the past in Algebra 1 to model exponential decay, and I figured I could adapt just a few parts of it to make it work for illustrating the Law of Large Numbers instead.

We started with 4 basic questions that my students pretty easily answered – I gave them a few minutes to think on these and then we discussed them as a class.

Then, I handed each of them a Dixie cup with 10 pennies in it. This isn’t that big of an investment (even if you have class sizes bigger than mine, it might cost you $3.00 or so to get this many pennies?), but you could also use counter chips or something that is different on both sides that you have at hand. I asked them to make sure their cups had 10 coins, since I’m not always the greatest at counting, and then they were instructed to go through stages of flipping different numbers of coins. We did stage 1 together, so they would know how to fill out each column. With our COVID year, I’m out of practice at capturing pictures of students while they work, so I just have their worksheet responses…

When they got to stage 6, I had created a simple Google Sheet for them to put their data in, and programmed it to automatically calculate the totals for # of heads and coins flipped.

Then, we graphed each stage of our results. In the pictures, you’ll see that when I originally created this, I did not calculate the total coins flipped for our whole class combined correctly, so the x-axis does not go high enough to graph all of our stages. I graphed this on my SMART board projected onto my white board with my own data, so I went off the edge of the screen to show my students what that last point would look like, but I also adjusted the worksheet to fit my typical class sizes for the future – if you need a longer x-axis for yours, I just took a screenshot of a Desmos graph I created with the scales I wanted!

Question 7 has them draw a horizontal line at 50% heads. After we did this, we discussed how our graphs looked slightly different but what they all had in common – as one student put it, they “started hugging the 50% line as it went further to the right” which I loved!

We concluded by introducing the vocabulary of experimental and theoretical probability and summarizing what the Law of Large Numbers says.

I think this activity did really help my students internalize the LLN and combat their brain’s incorrect thoughts a bit – I got better results this term on our assessment questions regarding experimental vs. theoretical probability and the LLN than I have before!

In the future, I might combine this with the use of one of the simulation applets – once we’ve physically done it with actual coins, show them what does happen when you keep flipping thousands more times. I think that might solidify the ideas in their minds even more.

Here is the resource I created for students – it will force a copy of your own so you can make any changes you want! I’ll also link a forced copy of our class Google Sheet so you can see how that’s set up and it should work for any number of students!

Guess My Rule w/ Probability and Venn Diagrams

I’m on my second time teaching through our district’s intro level Probability and Statistics course. The first probability standard is very basic information, like:

• writing out the sample space for a scenario
• all probabilities in a scenario must total 100%
• probabilities are between 0% and 100%
• creating Venn diagrams for scenarios
• calculating probability of simple events and their complements

Pretty quickly, it gets boring just doing practice problems or even Desmos activities for this basic information. We’ve done some textbook style practice (which I’ve converted to Desmos for covid reasons and will probably keep even post covid crisis) and the Desmos Intro to Probability and Last Taco activities. We played BLOCKO to introduce the sample space idea and talk about why probability might be useful. I was searching for another fun activity to do to kind of drive these ideas home, and maybe get more practice with Venn Diagrams…and I remembered Sarah Carter’s Guess My Rule activity that she has used to develop groupwork norms in her classes. Putting the cards in and out of the circles made me think Venn Diagrams, so I thought I could adapt the cards and rules to my purposes!

(side note, we are still being very covid cautious, all my students are masked, and they were able to stay fairly distanced in this activity. Research shows that covid is NOT spread through surfaces so I felt good about them both touching the cards and paper, and my class is also only 8 students so I felt good about our risk level and our ability to spread out in the classroom)

For the first part of the game, I essentially took Sarah’s original activity instructions that she’d adapted from a book and adjusted them for two rules instead of one, so they would be placing the cards in a traditional Venn Diagram (or technically, Euler diagram because they’re including the “outside of the diagram” option). I challenged students to play two rounds each where they drew two rules and didn’t show their partner, and their partner handed them cards to place in the diagram. We played a practice round on the board first where I taped the cards to the diagram on the board and had the whole class guess. I think that was important to them understanding the rules.

Then I set them free to playing. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures because we had an odd number of students in class that day so I ended up pairing up with one student! This helped my students really understand all the different areas of a Venn Diagram by truly using their logical thinking skills to decide where each card needed to go, and to hypothesize about the rules based on what was in the diagram. A few students I could tell were struggling with the Venn Diagram concept – one student needed all 36 cards in the diagram before she could guess the rules! Most of my students were getting really competitive, though, and would yell across the room “Miss Mastalio he’s too good at this! How am I supposed to win!” when their partner guessed after 3 cards. I had students who haven’t done an assignment in weeks getting super invested in this game!

When I do this again, I might put more rules in about only being able to make one guess per card added to make it a little tougher. Another complaint I got was that by their last round, they’d memorized all the rules in the rule deck so guessing was easier, so I might brainstorm some new rules to add to the deck before doing this again. The small set works for Sarah’s groupwork game, but I do think it makes this one a bit less impactful.

As you see in the instructions, after the final game I had them place ALL 36 cards in the diagrams based on the last two rules they’d drawn, and then calculate P(A), P(B), P(A^C), and P(B^C) based on their rules. This was a good refresher of the probability notation we’ve been working on and what a complement was.

After that, I put some challenges on the back of their diagram sheet. These were optional, but almost all my groups chose to do at least one of them. I told them they could get creative with their rules and they certainly did!

I don’t know why “only shapes” amused me so much as a rule!

“flat sided shapes” is so creative!

Several of my students really benefited from physically placing items in a Venn diagram and I think they’ll be more prepared to do so on paper moving forward. This also made them think more critically about probability instead of just “take this number and divide it by this number” which I think will help them as we move into more complicated probability rules.

If you would like the instruction slides / worksheet I used, go here. For the worksheet, I just printed slides 3 and 5 front to back. You can find the files for the cards and rules in Sarah’s post, and I’ll try to come back to this post and add my additional rule cards when I get around to doing that! (or, I’ll probably just add them to that Google Slide deck)

Anscombe’s Quartet Desmos Activity

Well, I last wrote a post on August 18 – almost 8 months ago. I’m not interested in explaining why or apologizing or anything – anyone who has been teaching this year already knows why.

But, I finally created something new that I’m proud of and would like to share!

I’m teaching a course called Probability and Statistics, which is our district’s intro version to this material. It covers:

• data collection (sampling methods and study types)
• one variable data visualization (dotplots, histograms, boxplots, measures of center and spread)
• two variable data visualization (scatterplots, regression, residuals)
• basic probability rules (what is probability, addition, subtraction)
• counting principles (permutations, combinations, binomial probability, geometric probability)

We’re working on the two variable data visualization right now, and my students first semester kind of struggled with the concept of whether the least-squares regression model was a “good fit” for the data or not. Basically, I wanted to focus more on residuals – what they are, what we want them to look like, and why it’s important to check them. Anscombe’s Quartet immediately came to mind as a good way to do that, but I didn’t just want to be like “well, here’s these four datasets that all have the same regression equation but look how different they look!” I wanted to do a slow reveal sort of deal, where they really got to play with the data before seeing it, and learn the lesson of why residuals are important.

I also was kind of ready to challenge my Desmos computation layer skills, since I’ve been casually watching most of the #DesmosLive videos this year. Before this, I had done a little bit of auto checking answers and putting sentence starters in text boxes with computation layer, and made an interactive slider for my conferences reflection activity, but not much more. This took a lot of googling and patience to make it look how I wanted it!

Here’s an overview if you’re teaching this activity. I walked through it with my class kind of slide by slide, since I know my students are not practiced in reading and processing long text directions on their own, but they still did all of the noticing/wondering on their own and the class level discussion was good. If you have students that are more self-sufficient in their abilities to read through directions independently, this could easily be assigned as homework or an independent in-class activity. I made certain answers “share with class” so they would still see some classmate responses as they worked through it.

Students already knew how to: make a scatterplot in Desmos, describe the association visually (strong/weak, positive/negative, linear/exponential/quadratic), and find/interpret r (correlation coefficient). We’d also talked about “lines of best fit” and how to read the regression equation off of Desmos’ output.

The Anscombe’s Quartet Desmos Activity

(the info below is also in the Desmos “Teacher Moves” for the activity)

Slides 1-2 are a typical notice/wonder structure. Note that we had already created scatterplots before doing this and described the visual association, which gives them more things to notice or wonder here.

Slide 3 refreshes their memory on the correlation coefficient and asks them to predict which dataset the regression equation belongs to – note that they HAVE to put responses for both items here or later on the activity will withhold certain information

Slide 4 has them test their prediction, and slide 5 asks if they were correct (obviously, spoiler alert for Anscombe’s Quartet here…they’re all gonna be correct). They must also submit a response on slide 5 before the activity gives them the info to move on.

slide 6 asks them to test a different dataset, at which point they should probably get suspicious…and slide 7 asks them what they’re noticing or wondering at this point. This would be a good point to pace your activity to if students are working independently, maybe snapshot some responses while students are working, and have a discussion at this point before going on.

slide 8 reveals some information, but only if students have submitted all responses they were asked to up until this point!

on slide 9, they get to look at all 4 scatterplots and think about which ones would be well fit by the linear model with this information added. My students said 1,3, and maybe 4 at this point, so the only one they really eliminated was 2, but they were ready to get more information because they sensed that only one was really a good fit.

slide 10 introduces residuals (you could do this activity after already introducing them, but this also explains it from scratch). Once again, some information is withheld until the student correctly calculates this information.

finally, they get to see the residual plots and decide once and for all for which datasets the equation is a good fit on slide 11.

slide 12 asks them to summarize what they learned. One of my students said “don’t judge a book by its cover” which I loved.

And then slides 13-14 are a wild extension activity involving the “Datasaurus Dozen” which is a similar collection of datasets where all the summary statistics match but they look really different – students are challenged to make their own dataset that also fits in the collection. I had a lot of fun doing this myself, but my students were all too overwhelmed to attempt it, which is fine. It would be a great challenge for AP students or that one really motivated student in your intro class, and maybe to pair up students for.

Let me know if you use this activity and if you’d change anything from how I set it up!

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.