Earlier this week Greg Wong shared an awesome resource he had created as part of his teaching inquiry. Today I introduced 'Mr Wong's Maths Challenge' to my to my Maths group and it was met with a huge level of enthusiasm. I have added the link as Greg is happy for me to share it (Don't forget to give him the credit!). My initial thinking was this basic facts challenge would be completed in 15 minutes, however when I called 'time' I was met with a collective, "Miss can we keep going?" I am very much a believer in capitalising on learner engagement and enthusiasm so we carried on. Greg's randomly generated arrays were designed to support knowledge gaps in basic factsrecall. The timed element of competition is how this challenge is able to meet individual learning needs, but on this occasion that took a back seat as rich dialogic discussions about how different strategies suit different numbers and which strategies were the better choice evolved.
Here is my first ever screencast. It describes how I have set up my google drive to store my digital modelling folders for learners to access immediately after lessons. Hopefully this will inspire a few more Chromebook teachers to have a go at using 'Rewind to Remind'. Fiona Grant captured this process on digitally and will share the work flow early next term. Here is the link to my site if you wish to see how my learners access our 'Rewind to Remind' modelling clips.
Here is the link to Mele's blog post that explains in her words how we use 'R2R' in our maths time.
In 2013 I wanted to my class to take responsibility for ensuring their completed work was published to their individual blogs, so I asked them to analyse the number of posts they had published over the year. We graphed these results and analysed why some months were stronger than others. This was such a powerful learning opportunity that I have introduced this at the start of each new learning year since then. Developing a level of accountability and responsibility for blogging regularly are the reasons behind this task. As the statistics available to each learner are personal to them, this quickly allows each person to make a connection to the learning. Over time I have adapted this task to looking back at blog post totals by year at the beginning of the new school year, as mentioned perviously, to looking at blog post totals by the month in term three. This is an amazing motivator as there is no hiding from what is still sitting in Google drives compared with what is published on blogs. The analysis process (done in teacher chosen pairs to help develop new working relationships) promotes a wealth of rich conversation and a healthy sense of competition. I find it really interesting listening to the honestly behind the reasoning why blog post numbers have fluctuated over time. The best part about this learning is the ongoing discussion that emerges afterwards as the analysing continues. I display the DLOs on the wall and find that my students tend to gravitate towards this display as the connections are strong. Here is thelink to my planning for those interested in trying this in their own class. The links to the student blogs below will provide great exemplars for your students.
Today Kiri and I took part in a professional development session that looked at ways to develop an effective writing programme run by Sheena Cameron and Louise Dempsy. The powerful take away from today, aside from some great ideas to add to engage and scaffold our learners, was the rich conversations between Kiri and myself. As teachers who share a learning environment having shared PD helps to cement our shared understandings, and allows us to make aligned adaptations to our own language of instruction and the resources we use in our practice.
