In my Honors Geometry class we are currently studying polygons and quadrilaterals. One of the things that my students have trouble with is remembering the properties of special quadrilaterals. In order to solve a higher-level problem, students need to remember such facts as:
The diagonals of a parallelogram bisect each other
The diagonals of a rhombus are perpendicular
The non-vertex angles of a kite are congruent
They have trouble keeping these properties straight. I've tried using "cute" little ways to get my students to remember things, such as "if a rhombus and a rectangle got together and had a baby, they would call it a square", but I haven't notice a significant increase in recall.
This year I created some "cootie catchers" or "fortune tellers" to help my student review the different shape properties. I put the different shape characteristics on the flaps and had the different quadrilaterals that shared the characteristics on the inside.
I copied the cootie catcher template and cut it out for my students. I then instructed the students for the proper folding techniques.
Students used their "cootie catchers" together as a different way to review vocabulary. They quizzed each other on the different shape properties and tried to see if they could name all of the quadrilaterals that fit the category.
Overall, students seemed to enjoy this new way of reviewing vocabulary. Time will tell if this vocabulary review activity will help on the summative assessment.
Last week I had the amazing opportunity to attend the SLATE (School Leaders Advancing Technology in Education) conference in the Wisconsin Dells. I was able to attend many sessions and learned a bunch of new things. Here are some of the highlights from my notes at the conference: The Power of Video Enhancement In a session presented by Michael Krill and Emily Goranson from Nature Hill, I learned that there are three types of videos:
Videos that show, teach and tell new material
Videos that enhance or review previously taught material
Videos that establish a routine or ritual (a call to order video)
Teachers can incorporate videos into their classrooms, but we need to teach students how to actively watch them. People usually watch video (such as TV, movies, etc) passively. In order to learn new concepts, students need to learn to watch video actively.
In order to encourage students to watch video actively, teachers need to create videos that encourage interaction. When a teacher creates a video they can use instructions such as "pause the video", "stop and jot", etc. to encourage students to actively participate in the video. Teachers also need to create videos that are an appropriate length. As you create a video, keep in mind the attention span of your students. Make sure that you tailor the content and length to your target audience.
Incorporating video in the classroom is a relatively new concept. We assume that because students have watched entertainment video that they can translate those skills to watching an educational video. This is not the case. Students need to be explicitly taught how to watch actively.
Bring in the Games: Gaming in the K-12 Classroom
This was a session that I was really excited about attending. As it turns out, the presenter did not show up for the presentation. However, two people volunteered to share their experiences with gaming in the classroom. They shared a ton of knowledge!
Ken Schroeder shared with us the difference between gaming and gamification. Gaming brings games into the classroom in order to supplement the curriculum. With gamification of the classroom, the students learn the curriculum through the game. The game becomes the center of the class and "tricks" students into learning.
Ken shared the "World Peace Game" with us. In this political-science study, students broke up into groups, were assigned to a country, and together had to achieve world peace. Here's a link to the activity: https://www.worldpeacegame.org/.
Ken also talked about different sites where students can earn "badges". Students earn the different badges for achieving different skills. He said that sometimes earning a badge can provide enough external motivation to encourage kids to participate and engage in the curriculum.In the session, they also talked about how earning badges could work for teachers, too. Rather than sitting through a specified number of hours for professional development, teachers could have the task of earning a badge. This way the focus is on the teacher learning a new skill rather than achieving a required "seat time". In a session I attended the next day, a teacher talked about how she designed her entire curriculum through a site called KP compass. Students could view videos and earn badges. Students competed with each other to learn new material and earn more badges. It looks like an interesting way to set up a classroom and I am excited to learn more about it.
December 9-15, 2013 is Computer Science Education week. The people at code.org started a nation-wide campaign to get as many students as possible to participate in "One Hour of Code". As I am writing this post, over twelve million people have participated in one hour of code! This is amazing! I am excited that my students and I got to be a part of this great event.
I think that many students are intimidated by computer programming. Others don't know what "code" is. I have been promoting this event with my students, and with my school, for weeks. As I was promoting this event I was asked countless times "What is code?". I think this event has at least brought an awareness to computer science. Hopefully a lot students were inspired to learn more! We have viewed a few of the promotional videos put out by code.org. Here is one of the videos that I showed in class today:
Our district-wide Hour of Code event took place at another high school in our district. I knew that I had a bunch of students that were interested in our event, but were unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts. So, throughout the day I played this video for my students and introduced them to coding through Google's Blockly Maze.
I briefly showed my students the site and the just asked them to "play" for a few minutes. They were hooked! They were competing with each other to solve the mazes. If they got stuck, they helped each other out. When it came time to transition to a new activity, students didn't want to stop coding. I noticed that students were flipping back and forth between our new activity and the Blockly site. Many students told me that they were going to work on it more tonight.
I ended up taking seven of my students over to our neighboring high school to participate in the Hour of Code after school. We had close to thirty students attend from our three district high schools.
We started with an "unplugged" activity where students were introduced to the idea of code. I brought in a bunch of blocks and asked the students to tell me how to build a tower. Students were introduced to the idea of walking through a process using a set of commands (move your hand left, grab the block, release the block, etc.)
After the "unplugged" activity, students had the opportunity to work with the Blockly maze activity. Again, students were hooked!
We then transitioned to MIT App Inventor. We had students follow video tutorials to create an app for an android device. They loved it! In a very short amount of time students created a working app for their phones.
Overall the event was a success. Now we just need to figure out how we can get the excitement about coding to extend beyond this week.
Next week is Computer Science Education Week. To celebrate the week, people all over the country are holding a "One Hour of Code" event.
In reading about this event, I have learned that 90% of schools in the US do not offer any type of Computer Science courses. Only 5% of students in the US take computer science courses. There is a huge gap between the number of jobs available in the computing field and the number of people skilled to do them. I read somewhere that for every three computing jobs available, there is only one person qualified to do it!
Since so many of us are so connected to our devices, it seems wrong that there is such little interest in learning what makes them work! I teach in a 1 to 1 technology environment. My students are glued to the iPad and glued to their cellphones. We are constantly plugged in and connected to the world around us, but very few people know what's going on behind the scenes.
After reading about the event, I decided that we need to hold our own event in Waukesha. Dan Pochinski (a teacher from Waukesha West High School) and I decided to organize our own event.
We will be holding our event on Thursday, from 3:30 until 4:30. During our event we will watch the intro video created by the founders of code.org.
After we watch the video, our plan is to go through a short "unplugged" activity where students get to think about all the steps of coding, without knowing how to code. I did some digging around online and found an activity called "Harold the Robot". For this activity I will bring along a bunch of blocks. The goal is to have the students give me commands that will make me build a tower.
When this activity begins I will not tell the students what the commands are. They will have to try to give me instructions. The instructions include:
Move your hand to the right
Move your hand to the left
Move your hand forward
Move your hand backward
Move your hand up
Move your hand down
Grab the block
Release the block
The goal is to get students to start thinking about how to give commands and how to order them.
After this introductory activity is over, we will split the students into two groups. One group will look at MIT's APP inventor. Students will create a working Android app called "Hello Purr" that puts a picture of a cat on the screen. When you touch the picture, the cat will purr.
The second group will look at Google's Blockly Maze demo. This demo includes 10 mazes of increasing difficulty. Students are able to explore simple commands, decision making structures, and looping structures all in a graphic-based computer programming format.
I am very excited to share One Hour of Code with the students in Waukesha. I hope they will enjoy coding as much as I do!
With our one-to-one iPad initiative students are able to stay organized and carry all of their notes, homework assignments, resources.....everything with them in one place. Although this is a very convenient way to stay organized, I have found that students don't have the ability to work through a problem while looking at an example that we've done together in class. Students have to swipe back and forth between apps on their iPads to see the notes and the homework.
My students don't seem to be too frustrated about this (and if they were they would probably download some sort of split screen app), but I feel like students are losing out on a great resource---their own notes!
So, I decided to put up a "word wall" today. I have picked out the most important terms and formulas for our current unit, wrote them on a piece of construction paper, and placed them on the wall. It is my hope that students will use this "word wall" as a reference as they are participating in class discussion and completing some practice problems on their own. Of course, I will take down this resource during assessments.
We'll see how this works. It is my hope that it will help with student understanding of our concepts and encourage students to use appropriate Geometric vocabulary.
As I was planning lessons for the week, I realized that we would end up with about 15 extra minutes in my Honors Geometry classes before Thanksgiving break. I had just read about an activity on the blog Math=Love about how to create a trihexaflexagon and I thought it would be the perfect end to class as we started our Turkey Day break.
What is a trihexaflexagon? Basically, a triflexahexagon is a piece of paper that has three sides. You can take a plain piece of paper (which has two sides) and fold it in a specific way to create a three-sided piece of paper.
I provided my students with a cut out template for their Trihexaflexagon.
My students then followed the tutorial instructions on how to label both sides of the template. Then they folded the piece of paper and taped it up to create their trihexaflexagon: a three-sided piece of paper!
Once we folded the paper, we watched a short video on what we just created. They were amazed! What a great activity to do before break!
This week we started talking about points of concurrency in my Honors Geometry class. We talked about the definitions of Incenter, Circumcenter, Centroid, and Orthocenter.
In the past I have had my students construct these points of concurrency the "old fashioned way" with a compass and straight edge. Since my students usually don't have the world's best compass, we ran into problems with the accuracy of our constructions. This year I decided to mold most of these constructions around the "Geometry Constructions Tutor Lite" App. We were able to accurately construct an Incenter and Circumcenter using the app. The vast majority of my students were able to construct their figures accurately. We were able to have a discussion that connected the types of triangles and where the points of concurrency were located.
For our discussion of the centroid, I had my students draw their medians on a triangular piece of cardboard. They were then able to discover that the centroid is the exact balance point of the triangle. They were very excited to be able to balance their triangles on one finger.
Overall, I think the lesson went pretty well. It allowed students to use technology and also do some hands-on work. It was the best of both worlds!
I know I usually write about math-related topics, but today I wanted to share some of the great things that are going on in my yearbook class.
I am a yearbook advisor at a school with just over 1100 students. Each year we order 600 yearbooks to sell to students and it always comes down to the last moment to see if we can sell them all. If we don't sell all of our books, our program ends up in debt. If our program ends up in debt, Waukesha North might not have a yearbook next year. So, we are always looking for new ways to advertise to our students and parents to make sure that all future Northstars will have a yearbook to capture their memories.
This year I have had some wonderful students want to get involved with the marketing side of yearbook. I have had students volunteer to make signs, talk with students during class and sell yearbooks at parent-teacher conferences.
This year we wanted to try some new techniques. One of the things we tried that got quite a
reaction was our "Parking Ticket" event. Students created "parking tickets" and put them on the cars in our parking lot. When it was time for students to leave for the day, many were startled by the ticket. Some were pretty upset until they read the ticket more closely and realized that it was just an advertisement. It definitely got people talking and thinking about the yearbook.
We also paired up with the people in charge of our vending machines at North. I had a couple of students meet our vending machine representative before school started in the morning. We placed address labels on many of the items in the machine to advertise our book. We kept our message simple: "Buy Your Yearbook: yearbookforever.com".
We have also tried to jumped into the digital age by creating a couple of videos to promote our book. The first video was created early in the school year. A group of students created an entertaining movie trailer to promote our book called The Unpurchased Yearbook.
This past week, another group of students took a more classic approach. They were able to incorporate photos and video to create a video that captures the moments and memories of high school.
Both groups did an amazing job with their videos. We have entered both of them in a video contest through our publishing company, Walsworth Yearbooks. If we get enough "likes" on Facebook, we could win a yearbook makeover. You can find our videos at facebook.com/yearbooks.
Overall, students seemed to enjoy this new way of reviewing vocabulary. Time will tell if this vocabulary review activity will help on the summative assessment.
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