Continuous formation

I thought that everybody did this! But apparently, not.  So this was my XKCD 10,000 moment this week.  I happened to tweet the following -- and I think it's my popular tweet of all time.  And as you can see, I was just at the end of class and tapped it out quickly... error included! The year is just starting and students aren't yet used to the expectations of responses when we do a Desmos activity, I've found I've had to prime the pump sometimes. I am logged into Desmos as the teacher and I project the Dashboard on the projector.  I try to get to the dashboard as quickly as possible so that I can click Anonymize, which makes the students' login names those of famous mathematicians/scientists/engineers. (Suggestion to Desmos -- it would be nice to be able to enter an activity with Anonymous turned on.)   This means students can make errors without making them publicly although invariably, some students will yell out their pseudonym. Then I use the PAUS...

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 using Desmos activities are a great way to encourage exploration and discussion in math class -- if you haven't tried them, I encourage it.  They're collected at  https://teacher.desmos.com/  But ... Desmos doesn't give you quite enough.  It doesn't have a way of capturing the work that the student does within their space, and it doesn't allow for annotation of class contributions as we come together to discuss.  Well, not surprisingly, OneNote comes to the rescue.  Using the Windows shortcut Windows-Shift-S it is really quick to snag the Desmos screen and pop it into a waiting OneNote page.  From there, we can grab our pen and (using wireless projection) talk about what all the different responses mean and where to go from there. (An aside : one of the nice features of Desmos activities are the way you can hit PAUSE and it will pause all the screens of the students working.  I always give them a heads up "10 seconds to pause..." and it's...

The first part of the story is here: Part 1 . The course I'm teaching runs every day in August, and Sept 1st.  The students return to school after Labour Day and then write their exam at the end of the week (we wanted to make sure we had a properly invigilated exam). I started the course on August 1st in Biloxi, MS, on my way back from Twitter Math Camp in Atlanta -- yes, a bit circuitous because I was on the motorcycle enjoying my holiday (Mississippi was the last of the lower 48 I had yet to visit and I was on my way to riding the Natchez Trace ).  I mention this because I wanted to make sure folks know I started teaching this course under some technical constraints.   It will be easy to look at what I normally have (below) and say "I can't do that/I don't have that" but it's clear you can do it with much less.   Being on the bike, I needed a smaller device than our school tablet and also one that (to be frank) if it got destroyed I wouldn't feel ...

So, although I tried to avoid it, I ended up helping design and am now delivering an online course in mathematics this summer, specifically the Ontario Ministry course MPM2D (Grade 10 Academic).  Fortunately, for the design of the course, I worked with one of the most organized and creative teachers we have on staff - so that part turned out going really well.  (Part 2 of my reflection is here :  Link ) We started off with a shared OneNote so that we wouldn't have to meet face-to-face that often - as it turned out, we met three times for lunch over the month of July and that was enough (we'd worked a lot together earlier so we know each other pretty well).  We ended up breaking the course into half and she took on quadratics and I took on all the other (smaller units) -- the course is predominately parabolas followed by Linear Systems, Analytic Geometry and intro to Right Angle Trigonometry. OneNote worked really well -- she's a (relatively) new Mom so her addi...