Continuous formation

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...

So we have a period of time in our course where we have two summative activities and then a final exam. Basically, a lot of time to review as we try to pull ideas together and strengthen skills & understanding.  And, as always, working on collaboration and feedback. Idea #1 Every day I start the class reminding them that we study and prepare for mathematics assessments by doing math.  Well in advance, I give them a tonne of problems from across the entire year.  Some multiple choice, some short answer, some deep-thinking questions.  Some textbook questions. Some practice tests, some practice exams.  I've been teaching this course for the past four years, so I've got a good collection of these -- and with worked solutions. This is now really easy with OneNote Class Notebook .  First, I create a Section in my Content Library of my current course called Exam & Summative Review  and use the ClassTools  Distribute New Section to crea...

So it happened that the day I was going to give a test, I couldn't, so I needed to quickly get together some review questions for the students to work on. (Sorry, I wasn't ready to start the next unit with them, and besides, it was the first class after the long Easter weekend... shoot me, I'm a nice guy.) Into my archive files I go... I found a test from back in 2003 that was highly algebraic -- just the skills they needed for the test and nothing else.  No "thinking" questions, as it were.  We'd spent the last week or so on word problems and questions that try to stretch and make connections.  I just wanted to makes sure their algebraic skills were strong & sound. Here's where life gets easy, thanks to OneNote ClassNotebook.   I used the PRINT -> Send to OneNote 2016 option in Word and it sent a printout of the test to my OneNote teacher section (called Content Library). With the page in the Content Library (in the right spot! I lik...