My Favourite 

by Jon Orr

Let’s start with this one question:

 

For me, I use a set of 4 criteria to evaluate all resources, tools, and lesson ideas. It helps me quickly narrow down whether a tool will help me achieve the desired results I look for in my classroom.

Here are the four criteria.

  1. I want ALL my students to show me their thinking and understanding in interesting ways. I want them to show me what they think first instead of just telling them what to think! I want to open up the questioning that goes on in my room. So I look and create lessons that allow for this.
  2. I want my students to discuss, collaborate, argue, defend, and justify with each other. I believe this helps clarify their learning and understanding so I must make sure that discussion and collaboration happen in my best lessons.
  3. I am always assessing! I’m constantly looking to see who gets what we are doing and who needs help. I need to be able to assess quickly the abilities in my room so I can use that on the fly to decide where to go next. Assessing easily must be apart of my lessons.
  4. Every lesson or activity must have a ratio between the cost of set up and the payoff where the payoff heavily out weighs the set up. Nothing is worse than spending a huge chunk of time, making, cutting, designing and then when you run it the learning outcome wasn’t worth it. The payoff must out weigh the set up.

My favourite all time tool/technique is WHITEBOARDS!! Having my students work in random pairs daily at vertical whiteboards.

Whiteboards fit all of my criteria!

A whiteboard. Students can easily show off their learning. They are quicker to get to writing on a whiteboard than on paper. Especially when the boards on the wall. Students get to defend, argue, justify their thinking with each other. I can easily see if students are understanding and the set up ratio is a no brainer. Here’s a whiteboard, marker….Go!

 

I’ve had students use small personal whiteboards at their desks before, but I couldn’t believe the change in active engagement and cooperation once they were standing. The discussions they were having about the math was much more insightful and meaningful.

Our whiteboard uses usually started as soon as the bell rang. In their random pairs they would put up a few homework questions from the previous day. I could see students looking around verifying their work with their peers. They were self assessing.

We continued to make use of the boards while we worked through our new challenges. Students had no problem leaving their space to go and talk to another group to gain some insight on new strategies. I can easily circulate the room to engage students in conversations and challenge their reasoning.

So….if you can, get some writeable surfaces on those walls of yours. This will be your next My Favourite  post!

[update May 2018] Check out (in Canada) Wipebook.ca and their education pricing! and check out (in US) Wipebook.com and their education pricing!

I found some stick on whiteboards from http://writeyboards.com

I also bought some boards that lean against the wall from Home Depot 

One Best Thing

by Jon Orr

The MTBoS Blogging initiative has begun! Check out the two options to blog about. 

I choose option 1 which is writing about something good that happened during the day.

Week 1: One Good Thing

Today was a good day! In my mailbox was this little package.

IMG_0408

It’s a package created & designed to make students feel amazing!

It’s from Knowledgehook.

Knowledgehook is an ed tech company specializing in  creating “engagement tools to measure and improve student learning“.

My students have been completing practice questions using their Homework product. An added, amazing bonus is when a student completes a mathalon (completing the majority of questions from the course) Knowledgehook sends in the mail a real (heavy duty) medal. Along with it is a pennant we can hang in the room.

Today a student in my class got that medal! We presented it to him in front of the class. IMG_0411
He looked a tad embarrassed, but I could see he was super proud! Big smiles. Later he told me he was going to wear it home to show mom!

That was today’s good thing.

#MTBOS — Career Changing Community

by Jon Orr

The Exploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere Blog is gearing up for its blogging initiative starting in January. I signed up to be a mentor because I wanted to help out this amazing community of educators the way it helped me over the last few years.
Following this weird #MTBOS hashtag on twitter has changed my teaching practice in so many ways. The people are amazing and always willing to share a lesson or strategy or a desmos graph!!!

Through the hashtag I’ve collaborated on a few lessons with people from across the continent….Last year Michael Fenton and I worked on a Go Fish game for Trig Identities….and we debriefed with each other after each giving the lesson! That collaboration I find hard to do even just in my school or district!

I found it absolutely amazing when J.J. Martinez (Whom I’ve never met — but seems awesome) sent me a video showing his class’ reaction to revealing the answer to a task I created and shared.

Everyday I find amazing resources and connect with people through this community. I can’t believe I used to teach without the #MTBOS.

I found blogging and posting pictures of our classroom activities helped me keep focus on making everyday count for my students.
Here was my first post on starting my 180 Photos/Tweets routine..If you’re not sure what to blog about I would start that way. Just share a picture daily of what you’re doing in your room on Twitter. The blog ideas will follow!

Another post if you’re just starting on the #MTBOS and looking for lessons, resources or blogs is “Let’s Find A Good Math Lesson Online with #MTBOS.” I thought it was worthwhile to share the tech/organization side of finding and keeping good lessons/resources.

So head on over to the Exploring the MathTwitterBlogoSphere site and read their tasks, and keep reading the #MTBOS!

Boat in a River – Airplane version

by Jon Orr

Take a moment … What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 2.27.30 PM

Click to enlarge.

What could we do with this? Where could we go?

I saw this video today

It’s this video that made me think of creating the problem stated above. Did you notice in the original picture that the distances were the same? But the travel times were different? What was the speed of the plane? What was the speed of the wind?

Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 3.39.26 PM

Click to enlarge.

I then thought of these problems…

A super common problem we see in our Grade 10 Academic course here in Ontario. The first airplane problem and this motor boat problem have no real difference but opening up the problem by asking “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” allows us as a class to narrow down to the problem together. It allows us as a class to discuss why the flight times are different. The class feels like they had a hand in coming up with the math for the day.

See also Dan Meyer’s Boat in a River problem — it’s a beauty.