Random Winner Game – MEL3E Day 6

September 13, 2016September 13, 2016 by Jon Orr

I’ve decided to spread some skills (expectations) around as warm ups. Today our warm up involved pay schedules.

They highlighted every two weeks on their sheet to indicate pay days…..and seeing which months had 3 payments allowed us to have a short discussion on making budgets around our pay cheques.

We picked up where we left off from yesterday’s practice sheet with percent. We talked again about different ways to get paid, including an example of getting paid by commission. I brought in the random winner game to give a little more excitement to just practicing. I usually use the Smartboard and sticky notes but this always ends up with a huge waste of expensive stickies. This time I re-used the 100 grid from the Explain Everything file from yesterday.

I assigned each person a colour (I only have 13 students—-otherwise assign each pair a colour). Each time they get their question checked by me and it’s correct they earn a tile. If it’s incorrect give them some feedback and ask to try again. WHEN correct they go to the iPad and randomly choose one of the squares to cover. At the end of class we randomly chose one of the squares….and whoever is covering that square is the winner!

Now since we’re dealing with teenagers…..this excited some of my students and for others……not so much. Although one student didn’t want to place any tiles on the grid she still had all her answers checked by me for feedback.

Tomorrow will be our first mastery day. We’ll spend the day working on skills from the week plus a quiz.

Grab the Explain Everything File

Percent Pile Up – MEL3E Day 5

September 12, 2016May 16, 2017 by Jon Orr

Today I wanted to see what my class’s prior knowledge was around percent. Since they are 16-17 year olds they have been exposed to percent quite a lot. But since their math skills are operating anywhere between a grade 5 level through to a grade 9 level I wanted us all on the same page.

I started off with an Explain Everything file I put together. The slides start at a basic level but then creates a need to determine equivalent values that match a certain percentage.

Slide 1:

Getting the explain everything file onto each students iPad, or getting them connected to the wifi, or showing them how to type in a URL can take some time…..so slide 1 is an easy intro that students who are waiting can work on.

Slide 2,3,4

I wanted to make sure that when we know the whole is 100 that just counting the tiles covered gives us the percentage. These were too easy for my students but it gave us some time to review writing a fraction as a decimal and as a percent. I asked students to tell me the percentage they covered and then we converted to a decimal and fraction. They had the option to record what they were thinking.

Slide 5,6,7

Right away almost all students covered 10 squares. I then asked them to convert their new fraction (10/50) into a decimal to see if we get 0.1 ….and then some shock on their faces appeared. Some students then knew their mistake and made some corrections. But we spent some time here going over the visual interpretation …..10% means that 10/100 are covered. This board had been cut in half so only 5 must be 10%.

Slide 8-12

Working on a new Percent lesson with @explainevrythng for Monday. Remember Fido Dido? #mtbos #ipaded #mathchat pic.twitter.com/OsWBDe4Uso

— Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) September 10, 2016

This is where we generated a need for an algebraic (proportion) method. The students could estimate how tall he could be….but they had a hard time determining with accuracy how tall he would be. So this is where I stepped in and showed them how to calculate. The remaining slides with Fido and then with piles of gold and then finally with no visuals at all were to practice this method.

After all slides were finished they started on some more practice questions on paper. We’ll finish those tomorrow as most students just started it.

Grab a copy of the Explain Everything project file

Final Assignment – Estimation Challenge

June 18, 2015January 28, 2016 by Jon Orr

For our final activity I started the off with this……

we filled in too high, too low, and best guesses! Then we checked the answer…..

Completing this challenge got the students pumped and hooked into doing some math on our very last days of class (especially with some students exempted from the final exam). Our final assignment is to …

We got out the iPads and I let the kids work….. here is what a few came up with:

A lot of kids did water filling or post it note covering estimates. Some kids ended up making an all-out 3 Act math problem.

Zack

How many caps will fill the marker?

Estimate & Answer

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Alexis

How many cups to fill the shape?

Answer:

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Meghan

A 3- act task in Explain Everything:

How many post-its will cover this triangular wall:

Act 1: She put a photo and a small video in Explain Everything to start us off.

Act 2: She provided us with a little more info after we made some guesses.

and

Act 3: Made a time lapse video and provided a screen shot with the answer

Grab her Explain Everything File here

[aio_button align=”center” animation=”none” color=”blue” size=”medium” icon=”download-alt” text=”Grab the EE File” relationship=”dofollow” url=”https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3zQp-gapBCeVmU2anF4Ty1DOUE/view?usp=sharing”]

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Tiana

How many stickies to fill the door window?

And hit us up with a time lapse video for the answer:

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Celina

How many water bottles will fill the hexagonal prism?

and the answer

Watch the water fill up by grabbing her Explain Everything File

A fun last few days….and I’ve got some new estimates for class next year.

Error Analysis & Explain Everything

April 11, 2015October 31, 2015 by Jon Orr

If you have read my previous posts(here, here, and here) on Explain Everything ….you’ll know I love it, and know that I love it because it’s so versatile!

Last year I created/used a series of warm ups or openers or minds on activities (or any other name) in my Advanced Functions class that used iPads:

Daily Desmos – Matching
Sorting/Matching functions to equations activities in Explain Everything
Whiteboard Share – Complete a problem in Explain Everything and AirPlay to Apple TV. Discuss.
Complete a new problem in Explain Everything with a video Hint built in.
Video Critique – Find the Error – Error Analysis.

This last one I want to discuss here.

That opener was a way for me to check homework ….really, a way for me to check understanding of the previous day’s work.

I used Explain Everything and created a file with videos of solutions with errors in them. Instructions were built in to the file that asked students to identify if the solution had an error or not, and if an error existed they were to record themselves fixing the error.

After using this for quick checks last year I decided to make it a full peer editing lesson this year in my Function class (3U).

Students grab the pre made EE file from a shared folder in Google Drive, watch videos of solutions to the previous day’s content, decide which, or if any have errors, then fix them. After recording their new solution right in the EE file they can play their new solution for the whole class to see via Apple TV or upload the EE file to our shared Google Drive folder for peers to download, view and critique.

Since we are always exporting as an .xpl file students will import those same files and then be able to edit/critique (record) over top of the existing work.

It was awesome to see students recognize common mistakes and yell out “nope that’s wrong!” Or “I think that one’s OK”. It was equally great to see them watch eachothers “new” solutions and critique them the same way they critiqued mine.

Definitely a type of lesson I’ll repeat, probably on next review day.

Explain Everything

Random Winner Game – MEL3E Day 6

Like this:

Percent Pile Up – MEL3E Day 5

Like this:

Final Assignment – Estimation Challenge