MEL3E – Day 8

September 15, 2016 by Jon Orr

Today’s warm up was another from Mary Bourassa’s Warm Up booklet (couldn’t find it on the wouldyourathermath.com site).

Again I asked for the “gut check”! Almost all students said they wanted the dimes….”because dimes are worth more!” I asked if they needed anything else before they began. They insisted that the needed the weights of the coins…so we looked them up. Discovered that a dime weights 1.75 grams and a nickel weighs 3.95 grams. I assigned each pair to a vertical board to solve the problem with one marker. I circulated to help those that needed hints. As a hint I found myself acting out with my hands :”If the pile of dimes is 119g and I take out 1 dime the pile is lighter by 1.75g…..how many times can I do this before the pile is empty?” I think using my hands to act this out showed them that I was dividing up the pile. It led to them recognizing they needed to use division. Once they realized that no more hints were really needed.

I’m pretty sure we could teach this whole course through Would You Rather problems.

For the remainder of class we continued the quiz and mastery day from yesterday. We had some connectivity issues today with the wifi so not a ton was done using the Freshgrade app.

Tomorrow we’re going to switch gears and look at the Transportation & Travel Strand.

Mastery Day – MEL3E Day 7

September 14, 2016September 14, 2016 by Jon Orr

Today was our first Mastery day. It’s a day where the students get a chance to improve on their skills. In their previous math classes it’s most likely that when they had a test or assignment their teacher marked it and then that mark went in their gradebook and it stayed there all year. So that’s great if I aced that assignment. Not so great if I did poorly on that assignment. Especially in this course, ideas and skills carry forward (and backward) from strand to strand. So…our mastery days are designed so that a student can choose an area of the course that they feel they need to improve upon….and then if they show me improvement I go to my gradebook and update their grade.

This means that our gradebooks change from recording test marks……to recording their progress/knowledge level on the specific expectations of the course (Check out Standards Based Grading in math here, here, and here).

For out first mastery day we had some setup to do. I am trying a new tool (for me) called FreshGrade. It’s an online student portfolio tool that also has a gradebook!!!! What drew me to this is the ability to choose a variety of different marking setups. I had my eye on setting up a marking scheme that doesn’t show the students a grade. It shows them bench marks like Approaching the expectation, Meets the expectations, Exceeds the Expectation!

I find that most students in MEL3E are aiming for a pass……traditionally these students stop as soon as they get a grade back from the teacher! That means the learning stops! The improvement stops. And I don’t want that. So….I hold back the number grade and ask them to “make it better”. And when they may have normally packed it in on that skill….they find themselves earning marks better than they expected. I want my students to improve upon all their learning all year. I don’t want the learning to stop just because we had an assessment on it.

For the first half of the mastery day the students logged into their FreshGrade accounts. I gave a demo on what they will see in their “activity feed” on their devices.

Each “box” shows an activity that I created (my activities are the learning goals/expectations/standards for the course). They can see their current progress on that expectation under the heading “Assessment”. When they click on the “More” link they see the curriculum expectation and resources that can help them work at improvement on that expectation.

On the What’s The Best Deal expectation I included links to a few practice problems for students to try. They open them up, complete the problems, or seek help on them and if I see improvement then I go and change their progress. Today my students accessed those new questions and did their work on their desks. They took a picture of it and hit the upload button and BAAAM! we’ve got a record of their work. The students get to build their very own math portfolio!

And the beauty of the mastery day is that their learning/improvement is differentiated. Each student decides where they want to improve. If they are meeting expectations on one standard and not another….they can go and choose to upgrade that other standard. As we move through the course more and more curriculum expectations will show up in their feed which means they will get more to choose from. Students can upload work on these expectations anytime. When they do upload I get a notification to my iPad/phone showing the new work. I can assess that work right away give them either written or audio feedback and change their mark immediately!

Here is a look at the teacher side from the website:

I see a colour coding of the classes progress. From this page I can click on a student and update their grade and then immediately update another student’s grade.

During the last 25 minutes of class I got them to complete their first quiz. It was 4 questions. I’ve sectioned off parts of the paper so I can give them feedback on what they need to fix. Everything is always fixable. Once they correct their work I’ll record their grade/progress in FreshGrade.

Since today was the first mastery day….a good chunk of time was spent setting all this up most students didn’t finish the quiz…..so tomorrow we’ll repeat this all over again.

This is the first semester I’ll be trying FreshGrade….so we’ll see how it goes. Anyone have tips on FreshGrade? The previous 3 semesters I was using “The Spreadsheet” that myself, Kyle Pearce, and a few others modified for mastery days. Freshgrade allows me to do similar things easier. What I’m a little worried about is when that list of curriculum expectations grow…..the first few will get buried in the feed. Think of your Facebook feed. Scrolling back to a post you saw yesterday is even impossible. I’m hoping those first few won’t get forgot about because they are so far down in the feed.

More tomorrow!

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.