Last Monday I presented a 1-hour session on Classroom Google to a small group of teachers at Pepper Tree. We went through the basics of creating a classroom, inviting students, making announcements, assignments, posting questions, and reusing posts. We also talked about the new feature that Google introduced to allow for specific students to receive an assignment. This feature will make differentiating and meeting students' needs easier. Here is the Google Slides presentation that I put together for the presentation.
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Monday, January 16, 2017
Co Teacher Station Rotations in Math-Update
It has been a while since I have posted in regards to our experiment in math this year. Unfortunately, the idea of co-teaching math with 60 students rotating through various math stations has not been as successful as I had hoped. We are back to teaching our own classes at this time. However, I continue to use station rotations in my own math class. I have divided the students into 3 groups. Each group meets with me every day for 20-25 minutes. When these students work with me they are in homogeneous performance groups. Then, in their other two stations for the day, they are heterogeneously grouped. I am finding the station rotations to be quite successful on this smaller scale. The stations the students work in are GO math online (my.hrw.com), prodigy.com, khanacademy.org, mobymax.com, prove it to me projects, exemplars, and/or group challenges.
Meeting with the students daily has helped my students complete their work in a timely manner and has given me a better idea of why they are struggling. In my group, the GO math assignments we aer working on gives the students immediate feedback on how they are doing on the concepts being taught. Mobymax.com has been a new site I have started using. This has been useful because it helps students work on gap areas from previous grade levels. Khanacademy.org continues to offer students videos and practice problems in the area we are studying. Prove it to me projects and exemplars are giving the students opportunity to build their reasoning skills as they explain concepts using math, visual representations, and written explanations. For group challenges, the students have gravitated to Ken Ken puzzles. They are enjoying seeing how quickly they can solve these puzzles. Finally, prodigy.com continues to be a favorite math activity for many students.
While the two teacher open classrooms idea did not succeed as hoped, I still believe this is a form of instruction that can work. If I had the opportunity to do this again, I would have both teachers work with small structured groups every day rather than every two-three days. We found we were falling behind and students that struggled in previous years needed more assistance than our model provided. It should be noted that even meeting daily with students has not alleviated math gaps. In fact, to help improve math skills, I have been doing daily 1 hour after school math groups for 6-9 students since Nov. 28th.
Meeting with the students daily has helped my students complete their work in a timely manner and has given me a better idea of why they are struggling. In my group, the GO math assignments we aer working on gives the students immediate feedback on how they are doing on the concepts being taught. Mobymax.com has been a new site I have started using. This has been useful because it helps students work on gap areas from previous grade levels. Khanacademy.org continues to offer students videos and practice problems in the area we are studying. Prove it to me projects and exemplars are giving the students opportunity to build their reasoning skills as they explain concepts using math, visual representations, and written explanations. For group challenges, the students have gravitated to Ken Ken puzzles. They are enjoying seeing how quickly they can solve these puzzles. Finally, prodigy.com continues to be a favorite math activity for many students.
While the two teacher open classrooms idea did not succeed as hoped, I still believe this is a form of instruction that can work. If I had the opportunity to do this again, I would have both teachers work with small structured groups every day rather than every two-three days. We found we were falling behind and students that struggled in previous years needed more assistance than our model provided. It should be noted that even meeting daily with students has not alleviated math gaps. In fact, to help improve math skills, I have been doing daily 1 hour after school math groups for 6-9 students since Nov. 28th.
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