Month: April 2019

Electric Slides

“Hey, Mr. Dull, What’s with all the slides lately?”

Electric Slide GIF
Yeah, not that kind of slide. (Source)

I think I might have mentioned recently that my Algebra II kids are perceptive, but it’s been kind of hard to miss these days. It started with the investigation they did into the math behind their NCAA brackets, then we did a one-day dig into the Monty Hall Problem. There was an Iron Chef day in there somewhere, and this week we rolled out a stats project that was set up in a slide deck.

So yeah, I apparently have a shiny new toy. Sue me.

It’s been a long time coming, actually. The great Katie Bradford first introduced me to hyperdocs at her session at the South Shore e-Learning Conference in Hammond three years ago. Chevin Stone presented blended learning ideas at the same conference.  I knew at the time that this was an ideal lesson design tool that eventually would work its way into my repertoire.

Later I (virtually) met the Hyperdocs Girls through Matt Miller‘s Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit. There’s a book (of course), and a hashtag, and plenty of folks sharing what they do, and an online exchange called “Teachers Give Teachers“. So when I needed templates and ideas, well, no shortage of resources out there.

I’m not as advanced as far as digital design as some other folks. I’m mostly focused on the lesson design aspect right now, making sure I’m asking the right questions, pointing my students to the right resources, and giving them an opportunity to discover, and then to show what they’ve learned. It’s a work in progress, but so far so good.

I’ve been pretty amped about the stats project, so let’s check in for an update:

And the first day was off to a flying start. My kids had a wide range of GSuite readiness, but with proper support from me and each other, they were able to create a Form to ask their survey question, connect it to a Sheet to hold the responses, and add a link to their form to a shared Doc (“The Big List Of Questions”). We spent the remainder of class answering each other’s questions so everyone had data in place for Day Two.

Straight. Fire.

I can’t tell you how psyched they were to open up their spreadsheet and find they had 30, 40, 50 responses to their question. Very few had any experience with Excel, so I gave them a quick walk-through on inserting formulas into a cell so they could display the measures of central tendency and the standard deviation of the data.

I had to be careful to not oversell the next piece. Desmos rolled out a suite of statistics tools this year, including the ability to create a box-and-whisker plot and a histogram. Super-easy and beautiful. I told them it was gonna blow their minds when they saw it.

It was a calculated gamble. More than anything this unit (even more than standard deviation) my students were dreading doing the math and drawing that accompanies making a box-and-whisker plot by hand. I knew that if we let the tech handle the drudge work we could free up brain power to do critical thinking and sense-making. Judging by the looks on their faces when I modeled how to make a list (copy/paste from a spreadsheet!) and then in like 3 clicks have a boxplot ready to be analyzed, I guessed right.

So Day Three is given over to analysis. I’ve got a series of questions set up in a Form, basically the quiz they didn’t think they were going to get. (My DC supports my semi-regular need to try whatever crazy thing shows up in my TL, while serving a check on my students’ need to get concrete practice on skills). I’m holding my breath there. Day Three is a Friday. Their routine has been all kinds of scrambled by SAT Day and state testing the last two weeks. Spring Fever has definitely set in. My students may be disinclined to do Actual Math.

Or they may dazzle me. I’m actually kind of counting on it. That’s the powder keg waiting to blow in a 1:1 environment. We can use their devices as $250 pencils, keep giving them electronic worksheets, or we can use the tools that are out there to help them discover concepts, analyze, and make sense of what they see.

I’ve been sharing some of the baby hyperdocs I’ve made with my tech/instructional coaches, with my Alg II team, and with others in my department who might be receptive. Don’t know if the concept will catch on in my building, but like a lot of things, I’m willing to scatter some seeds and see what happens. Maybe one or two folks ask around. Then, it’s on.

I’ll teach you, teach you, teach you…

 

Adventures in #EduProtocols – Iron Chef

drinking from the hose
Source

The benefit of being a connected teacher is that awesome stuff shows up in my TL daily. The downside of being a connected teacher is that awesome stuff shows up in my TL daily. Like, almost too much to use. My big challenge over the last eight years or so is to sort out what works for my classes and what doesn’t, even if it’s really, really cool.

There’s plenty of things I keep on the shelf for future reference. This week it was time  to walk our talk on an EduProtocol I’ve been dying to try. Took the dive into Iron Chef.

I’ll cede the floor to the authors of The EduProtocol Field Guide here and here for the details on implementing Iron Chef in the classroom.

EduProtocols
The EduProtocol Field Guide by Marlena Hebern & Jon Corippo

I’ve been using The Fast And The Curious with my freshman Algebra Lab Class for the last month or so. We do the same Quizizz Monday through Thursday, see how far we can push the class accuracy number. Then Friday is activity day, where I build in a Desmos activity or Three-Act Math or something else. They’ve been factoring polynomials of different types in their regular Algebra I class. I wanted a way for them to collect and share their learning.

This sounds like a job for Iron Chef.

I’ll be the first to admit I fall in love with awesome ideas a little too quickly. I’ll also admit that I can’t always picture the implementation in my head. Sometimes I need to see it. That was the case with Iron Chef. Did a little digging. Found a template. Let’s go.

I had them use their existing notes for each type of polynomial, but the beauty of the Iron Chef template is teachers can insert links to resources to guide students who may struggle to find appropriate/helpful sources or who might be less motivated to search.

Then I asked them to include a set of steps on the slide for factoring that type of polynomial, and a photo or video of them working out a sample problem.

1st Hour – wow! They were so awesome I really didn’t want class to be over. I wanted to just sit in the moment. One of my teacher friends read my mind. Like, I was wondering if maybe she was there in the classroom, hiding somewhere, watching.

6th Hour, that’s a strong-willed class. They really don’t share my enthusiasm for a lot of the things we do. But still they did good work.

The hook to Iron Chef (just like the TV show) is a “secret ingredient” that is announced during the work time and that all students must incorporate into their slide. I was tempted to go with “basketball” since we were in the middle of March Madness, but I opted for “music” since that’s a little more universal, and I hoped it might hook some of my more reluctant students into participating. Hey, it’s their work, not mine, right?

The class period ends with each group presenting its slide deck so students get a look at multiple examples of each type of factoring, and each student gets to present his own work to an audience of his peers.

The beautiful thing about eduprotocols is that they are a shell. Like Jon Corippo likes to say, it’s like making nachos. You have a framework, add what you need, serve it up. In class it looks like: Introduce the format, insert your content, students do awesome stuff, rinse, repeat. I get students collaborating and creating, doing a “brain dump” as Matt Miller calls it, presenting, learning. It’s a win-win.

We can do Iron Chef as often as we need to. Definitely putting this one into the rotation.