Yesterday Google dropped some big news releasing a quiz feature that will revolutionize the use of Google Forms as a formative assessment tool. Many teachers have used Flubaroo in years past to auto-grade assessments administered through Google Forms. Flubaroo is a fantastic tool, but it is not automatic, involves an extra step (as is the nature of an add-on), and is more teacher grading focused than student feedback focused. To see a comparison between Flubaroo and the new Quiz feature in forms click here.
You can now turn any Google Form into a quiz and students can receive immediate feedback on their performance. The slides below walk through some of the "how to's" and highlights:
How can this impact your math instruction? Students respond best to immediate, specific, and constructive feedback. The new features in forms allow you to provide that feedback and also to provide resources that immediately support students in accessing extra support or enrichment material. There is so much potential in using these new features to support blended learning and differentiation in instruction. I look forward to seeing this in action with students!
Perhaps through students watching the lesson unfold intently (but then again, how can we decipher between a blank stare and an engaged gaze?). Or maybe you measure engagement through class/team/individual contributions to a lesson (but then again, perhaps some students are only participating because they are "supposed to" and is that true engagement?). In my experience, the sure fire way to measure engagement in the classroom is when students ask questions (rather than just giving answers) and when not a single student asks to leave to use the restroom. This is the type of actively engaged learning you see during a Barbie Zipline lesson.
For the past month many of our CUSD math teachers have been participating in a Voxer book club on The Classroom Chef, which the book's authors Matt Vaudrey and John Stevens have been gracious enough to join in on. In essence, the book is a guide to creating meaningful and engaging instruction in math. While all of the lessons and ideas shared in the book are awesome and worth trying, 8th grade teachers Pedro Garcia and James Peng were especially intrigued by Chapter 6 "Barbie Zipline". Of course I jumped at the opportunity to support this fabulous lesson!
We used the lesson plan from John's blog post as a starting point, and pulled all that we needed to launch the adventure (oops, I mean lesson) into a Google Slides presentation.
The objectives were:
Determine the length of line required to complete a right triangle using the Pythagorean Theorem
Calculate average speed to determine the safest, yet most fun, parameters for a Barbie Zipline given the data compiled during the activity
Prior to the lesson, students figured out the length of string needed for their trials. During the lesson, they actively engaged in recording Barbie's (or Woody's) time in order to use this with his distance to figure out his speed. Below are a couple of the trials!
Woody's safe & fun journey:
The (last) ride of Woody's life:
Want some more zipline fun? Check out this Desmos model created by our very own James Peng!
Last weekend I had the privilege of joining a group of truly innovative thinkers in mathematics at the first ever #CUErockstar Math Edition.
In my first year as a math/tech coach, it was a surreal experience to take the stage and shred alongside some of the most prominent figures in the movement to transform math instruction. John Stevens, Ed Campos, Fawn Nguyen, Michael Fenton, and Matt Vaudrey all spread a message that math can be highly engaging (even intriguing and exciting) and that all students can develop a positive identity as a learner of mathematics. This is a message that drives me in my daily work, and it was a true privilege to get to share the vision with innovative teachers from all over California.
At the event, several teachers approached me feeling torn on which sessions to attend since they were intrigued by my content, but also that of the other presenters. Since I would never steer anyone from the opportunity to see my math gurus in action, I made a promise to do some screencasting and share my resources after the event, so here you go!
Session 1: Google Classroom in Math
In this session, we addressed the reasons that many teachers are hesitant to use Google Classroom in math, and then looked at math specific lessons within Google Classroom.
Here is a screencast overview of the ideas shared in the session. Participants were able to experience Google Classroom as students and then brainstorm how this might look in their own classrooms. The slides for this session can be found at bit.ly/rockstarclassroom. These slides contain links to the lessons/resources that we accessed while taking our journey through Google Classroom.
Session 2: Blended Learning in Math
My session on the second day focused on how to incorporate tools that support different types of blended learning into mathematics instruction in a way that supports choice and individualized instruction. Here are the slides with a few ideas for blending it up! During the session, we experienced several different tools that support blended learning together, then participants visited choice stations where they could go deeper with the tools they wanted to learn more about. These slides can also be found at bit.ly/rockstarblended .
Highlight of the Blended Learning session: Seeing my participants so actively engaged in applying the tools in ways that were meaningful to them that at one point they pretty much forgot I was in the room. So naturally, I walked around taking selfies.
Some other highlights: 1. Having 7 teachers from my district in attendance and ready to rock the new tools strategies!
2. Seeing the tools I shared at my sessions be put into action in the classroom immediately!
Today wraps up Spring Break, traditionally a time for sunscreen and road trips. Thanks to the torrential downpour (humor me- I'm from California) the sunscreen wasn't necessary, but I was able to take an amazing road trip down and up the coast of California, pausing on the way back up to attend an amazing CUE Rockstar STEAM event. Before we dive back into work I wanted to share my major take-aways from this inspiring gathering.
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.
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!
Cute story alert: During my first year of teaching one of my students showed up on March 14 with a pie for the class. He insisted that it was pie day. I went with it, since I honestly can't recall a time in my life that I've ever said no to pie. It wasn't until I was in conversation with a veteran colleague that I realized that it was not Pie Day, it was actually Pi Day!
Every year math fanatics around the world celebrate Pi Day. While the day has been nationally recognized since 2009 (thank you, Wikipedia), it not only serves as a celebration of the constant Pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter), it serves as a celebration of the beautiful world of mathematics.
At Monroe Middle School the celebration of Pi day goes beyond March 14. We've all heard of a Spelling Bee, but at Monroe they have a Pi Bee! All 7th and 8th grade math students are eligible to compete. Each teacher has five finalists (one from each class) who are invited to the final rounds. Yesterday at lunch I walked into a packed room of students quizzing each other on rehearsing the digits of pi. The two top contenders will face off in a final competition next week on the actual Pi Day, March 14 (3.14). Enjoy this video of our two finalists and join me in wishing them luck as they face off next week!
A little over a month ago I received this message in my inbox. Tears of joy, laughs of disbelief, and an inordinate amount of screaming into Voxer ensued. I knew that acceptance into the Google Innovator Program would be a life-changing experience for me, but most importantly I knew that it would enable me to truly make a difference for the teachers and students I serve.
I am a first year Math & Technology Coach in the first year that my position has existed in my district. Alongside my #CUSDrockstar math teachers and with a supportive IS/Tech team, I have been able to define my role and begin on a path that, unbeknownst to me, paralleled the tenets which are the foundation of the Google Innovator Program: Transform, Advocate, and Grow. As part of the application process, I pulled together a Vision Deck which identified a problem in education and my ideas for the beginnings of an innovative solution by asking "What if?"...
The academy provided the opportunity to dig deeper with potential solutions to the questions I asked in my initial proposal. In fact, many or my fellow Innovators dug so deep that they ended up switching projects! While I was tempted to hop on a team that was exploring the potential of creating a new style of school where learning is 100% individualized, I decided to stick with my math project, as I feel very fortunate to be in the position where I am working with a group of teachers who are willing to do whatever it takes to help meet their students needs as learners of mathematics with positive mathematical identities.
So the brainstorm process began. Believe it or not, there was method to my madness in the layers of graphic organizer you see to your right (please, don't judge me by my handwriting, I prefer to call it doctor-scribble). Blue is the problem and possible solutions, green is the solutions that currently feel impossible, and purple is the juxtaposition of the two that I will incorporate into the initial stages of prototype development. We examined a variety of ideation techniques, but the one that stuck with me the most is wishing, and examining what we can do to make these wishes possible. This tied into the concept of Moonshot Thinking, where we aim at a 10X improvement to what actually exists.
This was when I realized that I wasn't looking to just build a platform for my teachers to share resources and experiences with lesson design/implementation, I was looking to build a wide-scale tool that could benefit all math teachers and expand their expertise in going beyond the textbook, providing authentic learning experiences for their students; I want to give all students an opportunity to love math.
The scribbles above morphed into this:
In essence, I will build a collaborative platform where middle school math teachers can not only easily share lessons, but also share their experiences in implementation of authentic learning tasks, problem-based learning, and technology integration in mathematics, engage in collaborative and constructive dialogue, establish a professional learning network, and eventually receive flipped professional development. This would integrate with the already excellent existing resources from groups like MTBoS (the Math Twitter Blogosphere). The website would be a wiki of sorts, allowing for multiple contributors and crowdsourced creation.
As a Google Certified Innovator, I will receive the support of a fabulous coach (Sandra Chow), a mentor (TBD in the coming week) and the entire Google community. I know that for the next 12 months and beyond I will be truly supported to impact change in education.
As we wrap up January, a month historically know for setting goals, I have had many requests from teachers who want to incorporate more formative assessment into their instruction. This awesome goal stems from the fact that our CUSD teachers realize that no two students are exactly alike, and there is no one-size fits all type of instruction. When we are teaching, if we don't make time to assess what our students are learning and gear our instruction accordingly, then we run the risk of leaving many of our little mathematicians in the dust.
One of my favorite parts of being a math/tech coach is having the opportunity to sit with our CUSD teachers while planning and brainstorm how we can take instruction to the next level. In this post, I hope to gather the main "aha's!" that happened in some of the collaborative planning sessions I engaged in this month:
Many of our CUSD teachers have started using Kahoot, a gamified assessment tool, for whole class instruction. Over at Monroe Middle School, 7th grade teacher Minae Seog has started incorporating Kahoot into her station rotations. Rather than leading the Kahoot group herself, she has students who have demonstrated mastery of a concept facilitate the small group. These students then get to solidify their own knowledge by explaining concepts back to their classmates and she is able to focus in on meeting with a different group of students for targeted, individualized instruction.
Aha #2: Stop recreating the wheel in Go Formative!
Kathy Alsup, 7th grade teacher at Rolling Hills, discovered that almost all of the EngageNY/Eureka math exit tickets are already loaded into Go Formative and ready for you to use!
Click here to view a blog post on this and access the lessons!
Click here to access the full Go Formative library of assessments!
Aha #3: Go Formative doesn't have to tether you to your computer
Over at CMS, 7th grade teacher James Peng loves using Go Formative, but doesn't love the thought of being tethered to his computer. He is making Go Formative work for him by still floating the room during lessons rather that watching and monitoring all student activity from the teacher screen alone. He then uses the data generated on student performance to plan his next steps in instruction.
When Susan Smyth, 6th grade at Monroe, caught wind of this she had a brilliant idea of how to use the teacher monitoring features to actually free you up as a teacher. Why not use Go Formative as a station while you are pulling groups/running a lesson? You can monitor the group that is on Go Formative from the corner of your eye on the computer screen while you are able to work with another group!
Aha #4: Google Forms Speaks the Beautiful Language of Math with the GMath Add-on!
I'm surprised no one came to make sure that Christina O'Keefe (6th grade at Monroe Middle School) and myself were okay as we screamed in excitement during our planning session last week. Christina had been playing around with the GMath add-on in Google Forms, which allows you to insert graphs, equations, and complex math directly into your Form. Upon deeper examination of the tool, we discovered that it now also allows you to deploy GMath for student responses (woot woot!) and (drum roll please...) there is an option to use voice to text as well as handwriting/drawing responses. Game-changer!!
We have an upcoming opportunity to see how these tools (and more) are being used in CUSD classrooms to gauge student understanding during instruction. If you are interested in learning more, please join the upcoming session on Digital Tools for Formative Assessment on Tuesday, February 23! You can register at pd.campbellusd.org.
Please continue to let me know how I can support you!
Yesterday Google dropped some big news releasing a quiz feature that will revolutionize the use of Google Forms as a formative assessment tool. Many teachers have used Flubaroo in years past to auto-grade assessments administered through Google Forms. Flubaroo is a fantastic tool, but it is not automatic, involves an extra step (as is the nature of an add-on), and is more teacher grading focused than student feedback focused. To see a comparison between Flubaroo and the new Quiz feature in forms click here.
