My Favorite - MTBoS Post #2

For this week's (late) post, I am going to write about peardeck.

Some back history...last year I was a ICT consultant for my school board for 1/2 of the school year. Before entering into this job, I had used some student response systems in my class, namely NearPod. Going back into the classroom in September, I had access to a 2:1 set of chromebooks for my class and I was able to get a paid subscription ($100 USD - which seems really ritzy right now considering the state of the Canadian Dollar).

Using pear deck in the Math class for me has been mostly for formative assessment and to review old(er) concepts and make sure that students are on the same page. For example:

or

or

or

It has been great. Some of the benefits has been:

• increase in productive student talk
• increase in students willing to take risks when answering questions (when I display student answers, their names are not shown)
• ability to quickly identify areas of student confusion and then immediately take it up and clarify

Why peardeck? Well, I am in a GAFE school board and Peardeck is amazing within google drive. Here are the perks in my mind:

• Peardeck files you create are made in google drive
• Peardeck results include student name (as made within their GAFE id) - awesome to know who exactly needs more help or drew something innapropriate)
• ability to display whole class or individual responses
• TAKEAWAYS!!!!! Students recieve a copy of their own responses to my questions within a google doc. This allows them to review their work and get feedback from me or they can do some reflective self evaluation
• the ability to drag dots/arrows/numbers/etc - called draggables.

• ability to draw on other pictures
• Easy to share via Google Drive's sharing abilities ~ check out #giftadeck on twitter.

I also did some follow-up the other week, and the student feedback was overall very positive around the use and effectiveness of this tool in our math class!

One Good Thing - MTBoS Post #1

For this week's blog post challenge for the MTBoS challenge, I have chosen the path of "one good thing". The challenge is to: "keep a lookout for the small good moments during your day and blog about them"

At the start of this year I had received money to purchase a year's subscription to pear deck for the use within my classes. Thinking ahead to August, when it expires, I had invited my principal into my classroom to see how it works and what the benefits are for students. I had invited her a couple times and she had been quite busy so she had to cancel. In my head, she was going to be in my class for the first 10 minutes (for the minds-on part) of the lesson - goal: practice identifying the opposite, adjacent and hypotenuse of a right triangle from the day before.

So then I jump into the next part of the lesson. The point at which I expected my principal to leave, the lesson on introducing primary trigonometry ratios. I had done this in the past and it had gone really poorly. I found an "investigation" in the textbook, and I thought, could a geogebra worksheet do this too? I found this:

 ...and I edited it to include more information into this (drag the purple and red sliders to manipulate triangle):

I then tapped my inner science teacher and made a "lab" to guide student inquiry into the primary trig ratios (they were to all pick different values for angle ACB:

Link to pdf of sheet.

Students and my principal went through the investigation. At the very end, students realized that the three last columns were providing the same answered. I then asked students to try pressing "sin (their angle ACB)" then cos and tan for the same angle. The sounds of shock that came out of each student as their calculators matched their values no matter what angle they picked, matched their columns was awesome. Students really felt clear on this initial lesson. That the lesson was not staged for the admin to show-off and that it went so well was a HUGE good thing. Students had a very positive learning experience and understood where the three primary trig ratios came from/what they were based off of. 

And that was a HUGE "One Good Thing"