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.
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.
If in doubt, draw a triangle 