Friday, November 30, 2012

Purposeful Padding in the Math Classroom - Post 8

I was a fly on the wall, in the room, but not interacting, just observing.

Students headed right for the iPad shelf and got right to work with the Meteor Math App and I took a video of the room.  They were all in their seats three minutes before school started and hard at work on their app.  Not one tardy!  

When the bell rang, the kids checked their e-mail and started on the bell ringer which is a Google Form.  They swiped between Doceri and the Google Form to work out the problem and then swiped back to put in the answer.  Google Forms makes it nice since the kids can see all the questions at once before submitting the activity.

 
Instead of traditional notes, today the kids put on the headphones and listened to a Khan Academy video on equivalent fractions.  Afterwards, Gina revisited two of the problems that were discussed in the video and modeled a couple examples for them.  

Then, the students were all assigned four problems to solve and record their explanation in Doceri.   Here is the assignment:
Submit a recording for a grade explaining and working through each problem:

  1.     Simplify 16/24
  2.     Convert 6 3/4
  3.     Convert 18/5
  4.     Give two equivalent fractions for 2/3 and 4/5

We split the class into two groups of 10.  I took 12 of the students to my classroom and the other 13 stayed in their classroom to help reduce the noise while we recorded.  The recordings were e-mailed.  We have gone from paper to video assignments in just two weeks!

Lessons Learned
1.  Video is the learning modality of choice by many students.
2.  The Doceri recordings are powerful formative assessments.  By hearing the recordings, it is very easy to know if they understood the material and if they didn’t know it it was easy to see what needed to be corrected.
3.  All the kids were motivated to complete the assignment.


Written by Ann Feldmann

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