Mathsational

With #MTBoSBlaugust happening right now, it was very easy to find some new blogs to read.   Here  is a list of the participating blogs if you are looking for new sources of inspiration too.  When I started looking, I was searching for great ideas that I could use in my classroom.  Here is what I found. 1)   Socrative 101 - Making "Digital Task Cards" :  I recently wrote about how I'd like to use technology at the direct station for formative assessment more often.  One thing that has been holding me back is the difficulty that exists in writing mathematical symbols on these sites.  Rock Star Math Teacher posted directions on how to use powerpoint to make this process easier.    Here  are some of the of the socrative quizzes that she has already made.  Powerpoint has an easy to use equation editor and then you just save each slide as an image.  I'm excited to try this to digitize some of my current whiteboard p...

I'll be the first to admit the my formative assessment strategies are typically very low tech.  I'd like to incorporate more high tech options into my class, especially at the direct station.  My class is not one-to-one, but I do have a class set of laptops and many (but not all) of my students have their own smartphone or tablet.  This should make more tech integration at the direct station very doable.  However, I need to give students time to log off and put the classroom laptops away, so I'll be sticking to low tech exit tickets. Here is what I have done in the past at each of the stations for formative assessment and what I'd like to do this year. Warm-ups:  About half of the time, I like to do a fun warm-up such as Estimation 180 , Visual Patterns , Graphing Stories , Which One Doesn't Belong, or  Would you Rather .  The rest of the time, I like to use the warm-up for lagging or spiraled practice in conjunction with the exit ticket. ...

The process of planning for a hybrid classroom is not drastically different form planning from a traditional classroom.  You will need to consider that students will be progressing through the stations in different orders so you will need to be careful not to assign something at one station that can not be done without completing another station first.  You also want to be careful about over planning for the direct station.  The direct station should be different for all three groups.  It should be based on the questions that students have when they come to you.  If you find yourself doing the exact same thing all three times, you are probably doing something wrong.  To help you get started, here are some of my favorite resources. Direct station: I start off by preparing a traditional lesson.  This way if students do not ask questions, I have a variety of practice problems available to get them started.  Once we do one or two problems toge...