Mathsational

This past weekend was my second year attending EdCamp Lancaster and my fourth EdCamp overall.  If you have never heard about EdCamps, you should start looking for one in your area.  Here is a quick video on EdCamps if you are unfamiliar. I always try to sell the idea to my department when one rolls around. I tell them that breakfast and sometimes even lunch is included, there are great door prizes, you can earn ACT48 credits (Pennsylvania's continuing education requirement for teachers), and of course that it always ends up being some of my best PD  every year. This year I attended the following sessions and picked up a few morsels to bring back to my classroom: Math Tech Tools - I shared Desmos's awesome activity builder and new geometry tool .  Most people knew about the graphing calculator, but not the other two.  I really advocated for the digital card sorts since that is my favorite feature. The math tech tool that I learned about is  Ma...

Last summer I got the crazy idea in my head that I should incorporate robotics into my high school math classroom.  I did a ton of research and narrowed down my first choice of robot to  +OZOBOT .  Then, by just being very very lucky, I learned that  +Tryazon  was doing a party/giveaway opportunity.  I won one Ozobot bit for myself and one to given away to a party guest.  I wrote about that initial experience here . After this experience, I decided to apply for a grant through our local education foundation .  Again, I was lucky enough to be chosen.  MTEF bought a class set of Ozobots for my classroom.  Here is what I've done with the Ozobots so far. I knew that I wanted the end product to be a path that the Ozobots would follow.  This year I'm teaching geometry and algebra 2, so I decided to do this assignment with transformations in geometry and as a cumulative review of graphing lots of types of functions for algebra 2. ...

I've been trying to be creative about turning card games and board games into alternatives to worksheets for building fluency.  I saw some elementary level numeracy games using uno.  So I decided to create a secondary uno game, well two actually.  I made one game on identifying the type of conic section from an equation and a second game for identifying the types of angles formed by two parallel lines and a transversal.  Uno could also be used to practice other skills related to identifying situations in math.  Maybe another option would be for identifying whether a set of lines where parallel, perpendicular, or neither. Here is how I modified the game to for conic sections: And here is my angle pair game: This activity is pretty time consuming.  I did not have kids play by the official rules of reaching 500 points, rather I just gave them a time limit and the person with the lowest score at the end of the time frame was declared to be the wi...

This year I've taken on the #teach180 challenge.  The challenge is to post one tweet per day showing a glimpse inside your classroom.  I'm also putting the tweets together in a biweekly blog so that I can share the resources that I'm tweeting about. Day 131: Today we had our weekly cumulative standards based quiz. Quizzes today #teach180 pic.twitter.com/2BQHXBMDWw — Jennifer Abel (@abel_jennifer) March 27, 2017 Day 132:  Today in algebra 2 we practiced finding inverses graphically with Mishaal Surti's Desmos assignment.  For whatever reason, my kids understood this much better this year.  I give credit to to awesomeness of visualizing with Desmos. Today in #alg2chat we practiced finding the inverse of a function graphically. We used @MrSurti 's @Desmos activity #teach180 #MTBoS pic.twitter.com/dSuyN4LaGF — Jennifer Abel (@abel_jennifer) March 28, 2017 Day 133:  Today in geometry, we used Khan Academy to practice finding the area of com...

A few months ago, one of my colleagues nominated me for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST).   Although I sometimes get praise from my coworkers, supervisors, and the parents of my students, I've never been nominated for an award for my teaching before, so I'm pretty excited about this.  Most teachers will tell you, that they get more complaints than recognition for what they have done well.  So its really rejuvenating to be noticed for good work.  I was warned by another colleague, that the application process for this reward was pretty intense.  When I looked over the requirements, I thought (fill in some forms, get some letters of recommendation, submit a resume, record a lesson, and write a narrative) that the most difficult part would be the recorded lesson.  However, I think the narrative ended up being the most challenging piece for me.  I have dyslexia and processing language comes slowly to me...