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Guess Who & Polygraph Lines

by Jon Orr

As we come to the end of the semester review days are here. To help grade 9s review properties of linear relations we played Guess Who. Last September I ran Guess Who with my grade 12 Advanced Functions class with great success. I made up a new sheet for grade 9 with a variety of linear relations (graphs, equations, and tables).

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Guess Who game sheet

The students played a few rounds each! The questions coming out were pretty good! I overheard lots of “Does is show direct variation?”, “Does it have an initial value?”, “Is your graph decreasing?”
All great terminology I love hearing from my grade 9 applieds!!

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After a few rounds of “low tech” Guess Who, we broke out teacher.desmos.com and “high tech” Guess Who —– Polygraph – Lines. 

Students use a class code to access the game. Round 1 is playing the orginal guess who with pictures of people against the computer. 
The system then links you up randomly with another student in your class. You take turns each choosing a graph and asking questions to guess your opponents graph! 

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Again, great questions and discussions here! I could see the deep thinking about what questions to ask to eliminate options. Desmos once again out does it! Linking up digital resources while keeping learning social!

These students have been great to teach this semester! I’ll miss them next year!!

Show what you know in Gameshow!

by Jon Orr

IMG_3350Last week, Kyle Pearce wrote a post on running GameShow by KnowledgeHook. I was drawn to this idea mostly because of review time coming up and wanted a nice way to practice EQAO multiple choice type questions. GameShow is great for that. I love that it works on any device. Students can use their phones, iPads, laptops, etc to submit their answers.

Today I created a custom GameShow to practice simplifying algebraic expressions with my students. KnowledgeHook has a bank of questions already to go…..I just did some picking and choosing of questions I wanted to tackle and added them to my newly created custom gameshow.

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I stressed to my students to not worry about any time in the game. These multiple choice questions are not about speed. Let’s make them about accuracy. They played in teams of two with whiteboards beside their devices. I asked them to show full solutions on their whiteboards.

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What was awesome while playing our GameShow today was that once students submit their answer they can upload a picture of their work!!!

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On the teacher side, I could see how many solutions were uploaded for each answer option.Screen Shot 2015-06-03 at 12.22.07 PMAs a class it was great to choose correct answers and analyze them. All answers are anonymous until the teacher clicks the reveal.  It was equally rewarding to analyze the incorrect answers and talk about how we can make them better!!! Students seeing each others’ solutions is powerful! 

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Since I asked for all solutions to be uploaded the students started putting more effort into their answers! I find when we use other software like this, putting in an answer is like a game. “How fast can I get it in” Uploading slows it down and puts an emphasis on the solution! Like it!!! That’s the way a gameshow should be played!!!!

This program is super new so head on over to https://knowledgehook.com/gameshow/ . It’s free. And has content build right in. Even if you’re not from Ontario you can have access to the free bank of Ready Made gameshows or create your own. You actually don’t even need to teach math to make use of the gameshow!!!

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Explain Everything….more than a screen recorder

by Jon Orr

I’ve been loving the app Explain Everything more and more! Yes it’s great because when students record their work it forces them to think more about language and ideas than they are used to. I like that! That is what drew me to the app in the first place. But I’ve been loving it even more….. I’ve been using it lately NOT to record work. I’ve been using it to deliver content to students in a new way. We can use the app as a sort of enhanced digital workspace! Here is an example: 20140523-111859-40739536.jpg

Click the picture to download the Explain Everything file

I created this for my lesson on periodic functions. Here is why this is awesome……

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