What's With All Those Whiteboards?!
Lately there has been a lot of buzz about 360 degree math. This morning I attended Ed Campos' session to learn more about it. I mean, it is just throwing whiteboards up on the walls and having students do their work there instead of on paper, right? I was SO wrong. It is more than a shift in instruction, and even more than a new instructional strategy, it is a true transformation of what the math class looks and feels like.
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| Pics from Ed's Presentation found at bit.ly/360DegreeMath |
With 360 Math, learning becomes collaborative, transparent, and most importantly a process where students are able to make quick revisions based on instant feedback. The teacher can stand in the middle of the room (hopefully you just had a big "aha" that this reduces the need for a "front" of the room) and provide instant feedback to students, identifying trends in misconceptions and truly teaching in the moment.
Students also benefit from incorporating movement into instruction. Ed kicked this up a step further in his presentation by incorporating Music Cues (a strategy shared by Matt Vaudrey where music is used during instruction to signal what the students should be doing at any given moment, including work time, countdowns, and transitions.
So where's the tech? In the nature of truly effective tech integration, it's there only when it's needed. You can further reduce the need for a "front of the room" by using a single iPad to project the problems you are assigning, and also project student's work. Take a pic of common misconceptions and load them into a shared Drive folder for further class evaluation. Use Doceri or iPevo Whiteboard to annotate on the images.
CUSD teachers- want to try this out in your classroom? Let me know! As you can see in the pics above, you can try it out simply by taping up small whiteboards or using poster paper! We can then talk about how I can help you pester the right people to get more whiteboards and transform your math class!
"The Answer is Always a Spreadsheet"
The above title is a quote from the great Alice Keeler, which I come to believe more with every math training I attend. At #CUERockstar STEAM, the amazing, hilarious, and always entertaining Fawn Nguyen presented how to use Google Sheets to support algebraic reasoning with word problems. You might know Fawn already from her sites visualpatterns.org and mathtalks.net.
In the session she provided us with this list of word problems, and we were tasked with solving at least 3 using a spreadsheet. Through this process we were addressing several skills:
- Locating information needed to solve a problem
- Identifying relationships between quantities
- Writing formulas to represent the relationships between quantities
- Evaluating the validity of formulas
- So much more!!
For example, let's look at the problem below:
In an isosceles triangle the unequal side measures half the length of one of the two equal sides. Calculate the perimeter if the length of the unequal side is 5 cm. Calculate the length of the sides when the perimeter is 80 cm.
Quick Tip: I like to either paste the word problem into a cell on the Google Sheet or insert a screenshot so that I don't have to bounce tabs to go back for information.
In order to solve this problem, I had to identify all quantities involved (part and whole) and use the relationship between these quantities to solve the two questions asked:
- What is the perimeter if the unequal side length is 5cm?
- What is the length of the sides when the perimeter is 80cm?
The answers are highlighted on the spreadsheet. While this is a question that could have been solved by writing and solving an equation, the Google Sheet allows you to really break down the relationship between all quantities involved.
Below is a quick screencast walking through how I creating the Sheet to the right. What benefits do you see to using Google Sheets? CUSD teachers- want to try it out? Let me know and let's do this!
