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.