Got time?

#ISTE2016 Wow, what a great conference! There are so many impressive teachers out there and they are all willing to share and help everyone. We all love our students, but I hope it is as obvious to my students how much I care about them as it was obvious to me how much Michelle Cordy @cordym  cares about her students. Such an awesome finish to this conference!

Things started with a bang, too. The Ignite session was where I first listened to Ben Smith @edtechben and Kerry Gallagher @KerryHawk02 and I am excited to continue to learn from them in the future.

 I flipped my trig class about 4 years ago. I am going to #flipclass my Pre-Calc class this coming school year. Wow, a lot has changed! Luckily, I will be following Aaron Sams  @chemicalsams  and Jon Bergmann’s  @jonbergmann  lead and I am excited for all that is now available for our students. Based on what I have recently learned, my current plan is to use @EDpuzzle  to share videos and monitor my students. Any advice?

This was my first#ISTE2016 and it was apparent to me how much this community enjoys spending time together. So many social events, so little time.

Time – everyone’s constant struggle. I wish clocks had a 13 so we could have another hour during the day to get things done and another hour of sleep at night. I was so inspired by this conference that I got back on the blog after a 2 year hiatus, although I was never a regular. I know a blog is a valuable way to reflect, but I struggle to find the time. I am thankful this conference is in the summer so I have time to process all this information. I know I am not the only one who is trying to be a great teacher, coach, spouse, parent, etc. Here is my question for anyone out there that may have some input, ‘How do you manage your time to be the best you can at all these different parts of you without feeling like a giant blue bear is sitting on you?’

Super Bowl

Considering all the news on #Deflategate leading up to the game this weekend, thought this might be a fun activity. I got this from http://graphingstories.com/ but have modified the intro.

Here is how I am going to do it:

1. I will show this 15 sec video. http://youtu.be/YOHSNror9Vw

2. Then I will ask the students to come up with as many different graphs as possible to tell the story of what they see in the video. graphingstories-student-template

3. Then I will show the beginning of original video (Air Pressure), which will give them a specific piece to graph.

4. Have them graph this, then show the answer.

Enjoy the game!

Sugar Cubes

My Geometry students investigate the ratios of similar figures using sugar cubes. After their groups complete the investigation, we do a couple problems to show how to use the ratios of similar figures to solve problems.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3OBL2sZOHubYWx2TFhNQU1iYlE/edit?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3OBL2sZOHubQjR5RU9PS3JLNWM/edit?usp=sharing

Efficiency Secrets?

Here is my longest struggle. I have often wished the clock had a 13 on it so I could have another hour to get things done during the day and another hour of sleep at night. I try to be as efficient as possible in almost everything I do. I pay attention to my ‘circle of influence’ @7Habits4Managrs and try to focus on what is best for me as a father, husband, teacher, etc. I posed these questions to my math dept. “What is your best teacher secret? What do you do to be more efficient?” and got responses like, “I keep a folder for make-up work.” Since I do this as well, that is not really the answer I was hoping for. I have just recently joined the #MTBoS in hopes that this will also help in my constant quest of being more efficient. I recently read a blog about The Epic Evernote Experiment and wonder if this is another tool to help.

Something new I started this year is taking pictures of my weekly calendar and posting it to Edmodo for my classes. This has been very helpful for my students and takes less time than typing it to my website like I had in the past. 

So, same questions to you. What is your best teacher secret? What do you do to be more efficient? Thanks!

Here is a little background as to where our presentation started. I will get into more depth in the future in specific areas, but hope this will start some dialog to guide me in the future as well.

Transforming Geometry for Tomorrow’s Classroom (Prezi)

Last spring, we had just returned from the NCTM conference in Denver and I was trying to find a way for us to go to New Orleans. Our district said they could not justify sending our department again. So Kelly (other Geometry teacher at our HS) and I submitted a proposal to present. The district agreed to pay if we were presenters. We were a 1-1 school with every student having a school issued laptop, but the next fall, that was going to change to iPads. I had received a little training and I have always felt comfortable with implementing technology in my classes (probably just because I tend to be naive), so Kelly and I decided we wanted to try to jump into the deep end and do as much as possible. This was a very time-intensive experiment and not everything worked out the way we hoped, but we did learn a lot!

 

We wanted to try flipping some lessons, because we wanted to spend our class time doing more activities. Part of the iPad training we had received involved building iBooks. Of course in the training it was quick, easy, and the benefits to the students were endless. Turns out building iBooks for each unit of your class is quite time consuming, but once they are put together, they are easy to modify. We wanted to use iBooks because once they are downloaded to the device, internet is not required for most features. So the first thing we did was go through our lessons and decide what we wanted to flip. We did not want all the flipped lessons to be videos of notes. To take advantage of the flipped idea of giving the students time to process at their own pace, we wanted to lead them through short investigations on the video or with a worksheet and Sketch Explorer (like Geometer’s Sketchpad, but on iPad). This would give the students time to work at their own pace, then when they started discussing the investigation at the beginning of class with their small groups, everyone was in the same place.

 

Our other focus was formative assessments and we wanted to have multiple ways to assess our students. We knew of a couple of Apps we could use like Edmodo and Quizlet, but this turned out to be the area where I grew the most as a teacher in this process. Each App has its strengths, and I choose what I am going to use depending on what I am trying to measure. For example, Nearpod is a very useful App to measure students quickly like at the beginning of class to see what they know and what they are missing. The only downside is they can take some time to put together. ShowMe or Educreations is also very useful and this is something you can assign to students without much work on the front end by you as the teacher, but they are time consuming to watch.

This was a great experience. I feel like I have grown a lot as a teacher in the last year because of this. I also found a whole new world out there at NCTMNOLA, the #MTBoS community. Maybe I have been living under a rock. I would like to think that I have been working so hard that I just missed an invitation to join in. My students and I have already benefited from following some blogs and finding some sites with great lessons. So to all of you who have been working so hard on this already, thank you. I hope to contribute some of my own in the near future. More to come.

Kaizen

Thank you for another great conference NCTM. Here is my new goal. I am still in New Orleans and I have created my own blog. I have had a couple that I have followed, but now this is my new self-improvement plan. Hope to see you all in Boston.