Aim to Be Awesome, Not Perfect

*** spoiler alert - this post is not about school ***    In our household, we hate "housework".  We move piles of paper but don't really go through them.  Clothes are washed on a regular basis, but getting them from a basket to their closet/drawer/shelf rarely happens.  Floors only get swept when the dog hair piles get high.  We invite friends over to motivate us to clean. Like I said, we HATE housework.    But we live in a new-to-us house (9 months and counting) and we want to keep it cleaner. So my husband instituted "Seven at 7".  At 7 PM every night, when our grandfather clock dings, we have to stop whatever we are doing and do some sort of housework for 7 minutes (my hubby even sets a timer).   Our options are: loading/unloading the dishwasher putting away laundry unclutter the kitchen counter where we dump EVERYTHING pick up toys make school lunches for the next day anything that makes the house more picked ...

   So this week math department has a planning day, and I have to get a substitute. On one hand, I am really looking forward to it. Not only do my partner and I get some planning in and our department gets to collaborate on some topics, we get to go out to lunch! As a teacher, that is a rarity.    But the flip side of having this planning day is that I won't be in my classroom. And we are learning some new material... So I should be worried. But with the the abundant resources online, I think my students will be okay. My plan is to post specific videos on my website - so the substitute can go onto my website and show the videos I have selected and the kids can revisit them at night when they are doing their homework. It will be ALMOST like I was there :)    So today's post is about some of my favorite educational video websites (and all are free unless noted).  Math Playground - It has a bunch of games (great for practice!) but it als...

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...

This week was a short school week, thanks to the Martin Luther King Jr holiday on Monday and the sleet/ice/freezing temps that Austin got on Thursday night/Friday morning.  But it was chock-ful of technology! After much deliberation, I decided to let my accelerated students bring their own devices everyday to aid in their learning. This is just a trial run with 2 of my 5 classes.  We had a discussion on Tuesday about how the devices could be used in note-taking (notes app, Evernote, etc) and they could also use the devices to take pictures of notes/activities/warm-ups. I advised my students that this will continue as long as the devices were used appropriately and they maintain their grades.  Goofing off - BYOD gone.  Bad grades - BYOD gone.   So it was interesting to see my students pull out their devices on Wednesday to use as planned.  I was expecting pictures of the notes but they even took pictures of the warm-up!  Here are a couple photos ...

My life right now is a little crazier than normal... because it is Girl Scout Cookie Season! I am the Cookie Mom - which means I order the cookies, track the cookies, and collect all the money.  My girls have been very helpful so far this season with getting cookies organized and making sure the members of our troop get their initial orders.  And it got me thinking... everyone should sell Girl Scout Cookies! Okay...maybe shouldn't everyone shouldn't sell GS cookies, but as a math teacher, I think it is beneficial to students to be involved in some sort of business endeavor.  As cookie sellers, here are some skills (math and real life) that my daughters are learning and improving on: - addition (determining a total for a customer) - subtraction (determining change for a customer) - multiplying (determining a total, since all our boxes are $4;  figuring out how many boxes when given the number of cases) - dividing (determining how many cases wh...