Aim to Be Awesome, Not Perfect

I n my classroom, before BYOD and Kahoot, there was Blendspace.  It was my first foray into technology beyond BrainPop and YouTube Videos.   Here's the lowdown: My lessons are a mix of videos and problems to work.  I also include problem solving strategies and solutions to the problems. What I like: Students can go at their own pace. They can pause the videos to ask questions or rewind the parts they need to re-hear or rewatch. Students who need more assistance get more individualized instruction. Students who understand are not waiting on a teacher who is reteaching to a few. Students can take notes at their own pace - if they choose take notes while watching the videos. It engages students that wouldn’t normally be engaged. Students choose how involved they want to be - it gives them ownership of their learning.   In my class, students will work together on the problems presented, if they arrive there at the same time. ...

I have a great tech tool to share today! I have been wanting to write this post for almost a week but I wanted to try this out on my class first. Last week, at a district cohort meeting, someone shared this website with us - Kahoot . The cohort was excited to see this - we all use Google forms and Socrative (which are great too) but something new to use in our classrooms are always welcome. There are some great pros to this website. First, you can search the public quizzes and copy them into your profile, so you don't have to invent anything I'd you don't want to. You can also make your quizzes private so they can't be searched.  Second, you can set time limits. If all students finish before time is up, then it will move on.  Third, the program adds music to the questions! I love this feature and the music changes based in the time limit you set!  Fourth, you can download the scores to have a copy of your assessment and give a grade.  Fifth, studen...

So the last couple weeks I have been adding a little more technology in my classroom. For the last year or two, I have heard about QR codes and using them in a classroom.  I hadn't really bought into them yet, in part because I knew it would be more work for me. However, we were reviewing how to convert customary and metric measurements and I found this cool activity on Teachers Pay Teachers - Kickin' It with Conversions .  I liked the product and so I decided, let's do it! It was a big success! I had students working who normally don't want to work.  I heard lots of good math conversations with students teaching students, especially when they saw the right answer and weren't sure why their answer wasn't right.  Here are some photos: Overall, I was really happy with it. Since then, we have included QR codes in two other activities and I am planning at least one more next week.   So this does have me thinking... could I... should I flip my cl...