Interactive Powerpoint Module

Next year, we are going to be launching back into our PACE (Personalized Achievement Curriculum Environment) initiative and getting a tablet back into the classroom. I am part of the PACE team at my school, and we met with all of the other PACE teams in the district today for a development. Unfortunately, with a two-hour delay due to weather and a 2-hour early release due to weather (we appreciate not having to make up yet another day of school...) we didn't get much done.

One of my friends was talking about creating interactive videos where students could watch a screencast of her teaching and then self-direct within the presentation depending on what their needs are. This is a great resource for what she has found so far: How to Create an Interactive PowerPoint E-learning Module.

Story time in math!

Introduction to the Rational Numbers and Coordinate plane unit for 6th grade math. Your students will surprise you! Clicking this picture will take you to my TpT page.

Making Math Fun

The following is a link to a Ted Talk by Arthur Benjamin. This particular video is on Fibonacci numbers, but all of his talks are about making math fun!

When we have interim assessments, our school's schedule gets a little hectic. We often end up eating lunch in our rooms and I might show a Magic Schoolbus video. I think I will plan on playing this video next time! 

Back to the old ways...

I have felt very guilty recently because I haven't written any posts since I said that I would write about how the distributive property activity went... I knew that blogging would be difficult once school really got into full swing because once I get home, I have to think about the next day, which takes all of my mental capacity (and often more than I have left).

Since I last wrote, the tablet initiative has been suspended in my school district. There were multiple reasons for this, but what we know is that the company that supplied the tablets is going to be looking for a different product. They will all be replaced, and in the meantime, we are doing things the way we used to.

At first, I missed them. There were certain tools and activities that I had gotten accustomed to that I could no longer do. I grew really attached to the practices on Khan Academy because students could work at their own pace and get immediate feedback. They could even watch videos on that topic if they needed additional help. I was getting the hang of personalized learning.

My students were so happy to get rid of them, though. Technological/connectivity issues plagued them, and they were dying to just go back to paper/pencil for math. I don't blame them. We would do worksheets that had been scanned in. This required them to do work on a piece of notebook paper, but if they wanted to go back and see the original problem, they would have to open the document again.

I now have a better idea of a better way to use the tablets, and look forward to them coming back. I will not use them as an alternative to paper. Especially in math, paper and pencil cannot be replaced. I have a better understanding of activities that can be good substitutes for things that I may have done on paper, and I will definitely utilize things like Khan Academy more.

In the meantime, I'm getting acquainted with BrainHoney. I have taken a course on BrainHoney and liked the layout as an online student. I'm not sure if I'm totally sold on it for use in a 6th grade classroom.

I will also be looking more into this list of the best apps and websites for math! They are aligned to the common core, too!

HAPPY VETERAN'S DAY WEEKEND!

distributive property

I want to quickly share this resource that I just found for an introduction to the distributive property. I'll plan on using it this week and see how it goes! It's a distributive property investigation that introduces students to when, why, and how the distributive property can be used. Thanks, Brianne Langlois from TpT!

meanwhile, in tablet land...

Things haven't calmed down much! We have finally gotten to the point where *most* of our students have wifi on a consistent basis at school. There are times, however, when wifi is down for the whole district, and there are always a couple of students whose tablets are malfunctioning and are being fixed in the media center. If you've planned to use the tablets for your instruction or practice, you better have a back-up! And if you're assigning something for homework that requires the tablet, you better have a back-up for your back-up in case it worked in class and then somehow does not work when they get home... Fortunately, my students and I all use Edmodo and I can post screenshots and links to the worksheets on there.

I did assign videos as homework one night because I want to semi "flip" my classroom: introduce them to topics through a video so that when they get to class they have had some prior exposure. However, IT WAS A DISASTER. Some of the tablets had www.learnzillion.com blocked, some wouldn't connect to home wifi, and even though I had downloaded the powerpoints from the site and sent it them to the students, they didn't all work... I will definitely try again soon, but need to let some kinks get worked out.

And that is really the motto of my plans: "When it gets worked out, this is what I will do."  In the meantime, I'm scanning worksheets, having the students download them in class, and hoping that things between school and home go well.

The other day, I did get adventurous. A colleague of mine told me about www.screencast-o-matic.com and I see the potential for awesome! She is a Language Arts teacher and told me that she'll record herself analyzing a text by showing the text on her screen and talking over it; you don't have to include your face/image in the videos unless you want to. I started off by making videos (just by drawing in Paint) of a procedure for finding the GCF and for finding the prime factorization of a number. They were about two minutes each and very straightforward so I had my students watch them on their tablets when the first got to class as review from the day before. Most of my students told me that they were helpful and made things a little clearer, and they will have access to them for the rest of the year!

The next day, I got a little more ambitious. I had planned to lead my students through an activity but then decided to see how they would do if they worked in partners and had videos to refer to if they needed help. They handled it well, but I could tell that their mastery was not what it need to be... I've decided that at this point in the year, my sixth graders are not ready to be that independent. I will look to do this kind of thing again, but while there are the frequent glitches and connectivity issues, I just need to make sure that the math is my main focus and that I am always thinking about the personalization.

Happy Labor Day!

Most schools in North Carolina have only had one week of school, so it has been so nice to immediately have this long weekend. Hopefully, you have taken some time today to think about all of the work and labor that goes into making things run as smoothly as they do. Especially in schools, we always have opinions on how things are not working all that well, but there are people who are working harder than we even realize, without whom, things would just fall apart!

If you're like me, just because we have a day off does not mean that I'm taking a day off of thinking and planning! There is always more to be done, especially at the beginning of a new year that we want to make better than last year.

I haven't worked too hard today: I've just done some general things that will enable me to use technology more efficiently this year.

• I typed in all of my students into classes at www.learnzillion.com Learnzillion has common core-aligned videos that you can assign to your students. There is also guided practice, slide notes, and other resources for the teacher or for the students to practice further. The setup is the hardest part because each student has to be typed in individually. You then get a code for each one that they have to enter. You can print out a page of the codes and give each student their own slip... we'll see if it is that easy!
• I created an Edmodo group for the sixth grade math teachers at my school. On there, we can create folders of resources that we can each access and edit. The reason we're doing it this way is because Google docs currently don't work that well on our computers, and emailing everything gets messy. We thought about livebinder and other sources, but we all use Edmodo so regularly that this sounded easy! 

I'm sure I'll do more planning later... it's been hard to think too far ahead when we've had to spend a lot of daily time and energy planning for how we can use our tablets and working out the kinks that we currently have. I've only had about two days of instruction, and that was on divisibility rules- not even in our curriculum! When we get back tomorrow, I intend to have all of my students create Edmodo and Learnzillion accounts, review divisibility, and then get ready for GCF by assigning a couple of videos for homework as preview.

OK! My labor is done!

I'll leave you with the other work that I did today...

Working hard on the water of Smith Mountain Lake, VA!