Continuous formation

So I'm only on the 2nd class of the year in my Grade 10 Math course so far.  We start late, and we only see them for 3 hours a week, so yes, we move a little slow. I had set them some review problems in Grade 9 Math, mostly questions of simple algebra, linear equations, graphs of lines, etc.  And had them work on the questions about as freely as I could -- but since they're new, they didn't express much freedom. They didn't talk much, they certainly didn't talk to each other, and they didn't check their work with each other. This will change.   I had deliberately told them that I did not put the answers at the bottom of the OneNote page and that they would have to check their work somehow. Ten minutes in, I did a screen capture of a student's work from their OneNote Section and pasted it into my OneNote page for the day and asked them " How does the student know they're correct ?" The obvious answers came up: Do it again Check with anot...

So everything we do is in OneNote. Everything. But we (okay, me) are trying to break out into other tools and that includes Microsoft Teams and their Assignment workflow.  What I tried was this: 1) In a Word document we wrote about what they had to do and how they would be assessed. Parenthetically -- Word works GREAT with Teams! I have a Channel in our Math Department Team for our MPM2D course and we created the Word document in there and then collaboratively edited it on our own devices at our own pace. I prefer to use my desktop at home and when I opened Word, it went to Teams on its own and grabbed the file and I could continue to edit.  Nice! 2) Then I went to the TEAM for my course and created an Assignment.  Now, Teams lets you assign an Assignment to more than one section at a time, which is nice cuz I've got 3.  This got posted to their Assignments page and they were off! Okay, it was a little funny; this was the first time I had given them an As...

So, long story short, we have a bit of extra time in our Right-Angle Trigonometry unit, so I mentioned to my team that I would put together a BreakOut for review.  During this time, we have a lot of kids away for various reasons so having something self-paced is helpful. You can read more about creating BreakOut/EscapeRooms in OneNote on my earlier post here: Escape Room / BreakOut in OneNote - even if you don't use OneNote in your school, you could do this with a Personal OneNote.  All you have to do is create a view-only Share with your class and they can view it online!  Even on their phones! I first made a OneNote Notebook and shared it with the other members of my team. I had hoped that they would contribute but only one jumped on board and added some questions -- not upset though. There's a lot of things that happen at my school, so I just lay out breadcrumbs and see who's hungry enough to follow. In this Notebook, I created 5 Sections - each section is a "R...

[[Part 2 of this article is here: Link] ] So when I was visiting  Anna in Edinburgh  during March Break, she showed me how she used Password-Protected OneNote sections within the OneNote ClassNotebook to help students check their work -- she set the password to the correct answer, so they knew they had it right when the Section opened up. I figured I could use this for Math Review, so I set aside a couple of hours (turned out to be 3 hours but a fair chunk of that was solution-time) the other night to put an Exam Review together for my Grade 10 Mathematics course.  I pulled together as many multiple choice questions and short answer questions on the topics as I could Google and tried to balance each Section with a mix of topics and then threw in a couple of pop-culture questions, too.  The students worked on the problems in each section and used the answers as passwords to unlock the next section until they got to the Prize section. Result?  Near to...