There are a lot of affordances for wikis in the classroom.  I have used them and found that they are a great treasure to deposit a bunch of math concepts on.  Students really have had a lot of individual fun on them as well.  My first experience with them was in the summer of 2009.  I had my students simply use them to work on tests together without talking.  Each group had their own page and would collaborate by putting down the answers and members would either change the answer or simply do the other problems. I tend to use summer school to experiment with these types of technologies without any formal training.
My next experience with using a wiki was to redo my home page for school.  It gave me more freedom and it was easier to use.  CHECK OUT MY OLD SCHOOL WIKI.  Again, the whole idea of the wiki was still in its infancy in my mind and I really had not figured out how to use it well.  Without enough time to see the benefits in education, I really was only playing around with it so that I can learn it and hoping some sort of lightning bolt of knowledge would hit me.  I was also learning so many other tools at the time that I had no idea which were good or bad.  They just all seemed new and fun and I wanted to introduce the students to all of them because I knew other teachers would not.  This turned out to be a very bad thing when trying to promote change in a classroom.
The last time I used a wiki in class, I had the students working on it.  They were each in charge of posting our notes on it each week.  For each lesson, they were to link a video, a picture summarizing the topic of discussion, a game site(if found), and a link to definitions of the math words learned.  It proved to be too much management for me and a lot of extra work for the students.  The idea was for them to be creating a hypermedia presentation for reference.  Students would then build on it from each class and each semester.  I did not feel I had enough time to teach a wiki and teach the curriculum.  I now know that I do.
If this class has taught me one thing, it is that scaffolding is a very powerful principle in school.  I can, and probably will, go back to the wiki idea.  However, this time, lessons will be scaffolded in a way that it will not only teach the students the layout of a wiki, but allow them to creatively add on to it as well.  I do not have to manage it as I thought I did.  I would rather let it be more of an organic thing.  As time goes on and more people add to it, more will want to add to it and make it better.  It could ultimately end up being a great piece of work.
Stay tuned for Wiki 2.0 in my classroom, it might take a while, but it could prove to be one of the best references in Loudoun.  Especially, if I reach beyond the school walls and have other schools participate.

Blog? Yes please.

Over the past few years, I have been amazed at how far online publications have become a part of my life.  I currently subscribe to over 15 different educator blogs and learn ideas about   not only what others in my profession are thinking, but what they have to offer to the educational community.  At this time, I am simply offering my lens of how cool I think these things are.  I have read everything from why we should not give homework across every curriculum to seeing some of the coolest approaches to my subject matter.  From other teachers giving 30 day initiatives to becoming friends and communicating with them on Twitter.  In fact, from blog to twitter, I met a few of these people when I went to a conference in summer of 2010 at the ISTE conference.  All of us had a common goal.  A goal to transform education or at least do our part to bring a different approach to how we presented information inside our classrooms.  I have also joined people in webinars along the way.  All because I found their blogs interesting and inspiring and had to take that relationship a little further.

At the beginning of 2010-2011 school year, I naively wanted to introduce blogs into my classroom simply because I could see some of the affordances of them.  I had one of my classes put up all of their presentations online and begin keeping their digital lives archived.  I furthered lessons by keeping my assignments online and commenting on what they were doing.  On the student blogs, they added links that connected them to websites that they would frequently use in my class.  They used them to reflect on their assignments using questions that I had posted.  I also had them begin keeping a diary of vocabulary.  Unfortunately, this proved to be too much work for me and I had to drop it.  Managing their use of the blogs along with building my entire curriculum around teaching the uses of these things proved to be a lot of work that I was not willing to attach to their grades.  I have tried blogs a couple of times because I have seen the power of them.  My most successful story of students learning blogs is that one of my students has managed to keep tuning into his..............and that to me, makes it all worth the effort.  Here is an example of the blog I keep coming back to you.  You will notice my students will be down on the left side, most or all which have not been touched since they were part of my classes.

The thing that will always keep my mind shuffled is that my students were able to intelligently understand the use of blogs.  They searched the internet and found others that they were interested in.  They hated keeping their own up to date because it was subject related, but were also able to see value in the ones that they had read.  The optimist in me simply wants to think that blogging was so new to these students that they had a hard time seeing their own benefit of using them.  I want to think I planted a seed that will lead them to a path of connecting to other people's knowledge and thoughts.  With the population that I teach and the adult troubles that they face, it is important to see that they are not alone.

Geometry Test

For weeks I've been meaning to post this and today I'm finally going to do it.  The bad part is that I didn't take any pictures to show, but maybe later.

So we had just finished reading the back of the napkin.  I put a mind map up on the board of all of the relationship of triangles whether they are similar or congruent.  For those of you struggling to remember, Side Side Side or Angle Side Angle are some of the proofs that they needed to know.  The map worked great and the portion of the class that participated, I feel, really got something out of it.  A few days later we watched one of the videos that we saw in class with that fella doing the mind map.  Here it is.  We then followed this up with a discussion on how the mind map was set up and how it told a story.  Similar to what we did in our night class.

I then asked the students to come up with their own maps using all of the materials that we use in class along with the topics that we learned.  I put them in groups of three.  They had a lot of fun doing this project and I felt like it was a good way to assess whether or not they retained the information presented to them over the course.  I've come to a conclusion that it isn't necessary for them to remember how to solve all of the problems in every section that we cover, but to have a general idea of what they've learned.  Also, I want them to know why we use these techniques.  In class we have already gone through the processes of using the formulas and information to solve problems.  It feels better to me if they were to remember that there is a technique to solving the problem and they have an idea of where to look if ever they needed to solve a problem.  To me, this seems more practical in life although not so practical for the SOL's.

Hopefully, I'll get pictures of their maps and post them.  They are hanging outside of my room.

Test Before Break

The dilemma is Spring Break and having the students remember what it is that we were working on before they took 9 days off.  It came to me on the drive home while listening to Pandora.  The song "Story of My Life" by Social Distortion was the song.  I ended up getting into it just like Tom Cruise got into the song "Free Falling" .

I researched YouTube and was able to find a link that showed the lyrics.  As a class we listened and watched.  Afterwards, we broke it down to how each of the verses or as my kids corrected me, the sonnets, were set up.  We determined whether or not it had to rhyme, how many sentences were in a sonnet, and how the syllables went along with the tune.

The kids were wrapping up a unit on Right Triangles.  It turned out to work perfectly.  Since there were only 5 students who showed up in class and 5 different topics we talked about, each student chose a topic and began putting together their song.  They worked for the entirety of the class, asked very good questions, listened to the song more times than I could stand, helped each other, laughed and learned.  They did this while most other teachers were watching movies.

The good that came out of it is that students were getting a chance to step back and focus on the topic.  They didn't complete the song due to poor planning of time, but this turns out to be a good thing.  We will complete our songs on the Monday we get back, giving the students a renewed focus as to where we were before they left.  One student who missed a class that week picked a topic he was not in class for.  So he had to learn the topic before he could write about it.  Naturally, his classmates helped him with this.  I had them focus their energy this time into the meat and potatoes of the lessons as opposed to the poems that we did and most of them simply just wrote about how they feel about the subject matter.

The feedback that I got was mostly a positive one.  The students' only gripe was that they weren't able to choose the song that they would write to.  They wanted a rap song.  I told them my car driving story and they were pretty much SOL once I heard that on the radio.

We are going to wrap this up by recording it and if it's any good, we will post it on YouTube.

Pic of Garden from earlier post

Unfortuanately, I forgot to take a picture of it while it was hanging up.





Poetic Assessment

Twas the night before Thursday and all through the house, all the ITSers were stirring, with rhymes for each verse????.  Well you get the point.  So, I went to school the very next day, and because we had just finished a unit, it was test day!!  Yay!!!!
In class I have been using a website produced by Henrico County that has everything you need to know for Geometry.  Already produced worksheets and powerpoints, along with some other connections.  The only things it is missing is the assessment pieces.  So I, who am a newby when it comes to teaching Geometry, have been pairing up the lessons from online to the sections of the book.  This way I can draw questions from the assessment pieces from our book.  Well, after each test, the students have made it clear they didn't like the format.  I have now changed it up 4 times for 4 tests.  So I decided to use the same types of poems that we used in class the night before to help in the assessment.  We paired up and the kids were to come up with four different types of poems for the material that we have covered.  Since it was their first time, I wanted to go light on them in terms of grading.  They did a great job!!  They were laughing and actually having fun.  I had them read them aloud and it was fun to see how humble they became.  For the majority, they were able to draw some of the basic concepts from the lessons and put it into words.  For some, they were able to take the tougher concepts and produce fun little poems.  It really helped me see where the students were in their understanding.  Many obviously hadn't crossed from their middle school understanding of triangles to the deeper concepts.  One group focused on their frustration of having to learn these things.  I finished up the assessment with an 8 question multiple choice test.  Given that I may use this form of assessment again, I will make sure that I will bring up their old poems and let them know a little more specifically what I am looking for.  It also would've been nice if I had time to produce a better rubric.  The one I handed them was a little rushed and only covered the basic understanding of the poems.  I needed to make sure they covered the specifics of what they had learned.  Whatever the case, the students had fun in a math class.  That in itself is an achievement.

Hexagonal Informational Garden

So I broke a bit of the golden rule in class, but it was worth it.  I know when designing a lesson, we are supposed to connect each lesson to something into the real world and try to connect it outside the school walls.  This time I decided to stay within the school walls and tell the kids the truth.  They were helping me with the bulletin board since I was in charge of this months display.  Ugh!!  I hate my turn on the bulletin board.

We've been talking a whole lot about draw tools and paint tools in our evening class.  Naturally, I strayed right towards that, but not before I thought about how to implement it.  In Geometry, there are two draw tools that have been all of the talk for geometry teachers, SketchPad (paid) and Geogebra (free).  I took the time to introduce them to the tool.  I gave them a short step - by - step instruction sheet that would help them explore some of the basic tools and teach them how to create a cube using the tools.  What was great is that the instructions implemented the techniques used in creating the figure just as we had previously done using other tools (compass, ruler, protractor).  So the connection was made with the students.  They also become really familiar with terminology such as points, line segments, rays, parallels, and I can keep going, but bottom line is each tool has a picture with it.  This really helps them treat these basics like second nature because of the repetition of use.

So, to make a long story longer.  I have a bulletin board.  I took the students through some of the basics on how to start creating the hexagon.  I then showed them how to transfer their picture into paint and use the fill tool, resize, and change colors.  Ultimately, they had a choice.  Once they followed the directions on creating a hexagon using a certain design, they were to either print it out and color it with their own style or put it into paint and use the paint program to do the same thing, then add a stem onto it so it became a flower.  They were then to grab a snap of information (I told them to google "cool infographics"), and paste this to their hexagon.  I showed them a finished product that I had done previously and that is all it took.  So the criteria was for them to create the two designs I had showed them for credit, then they can create their own flowers on their own time for extra points, ultimately helping the HEXAGONAL GARDEN GROW throughout the month.

In a quick wrap up, the students actually leaned more towards using the paint program to color their pictures. They loved the fact that they could choose the information that went onto their flower.  They loved to design something that was going to help out.  Their fluency in the program was exponential.  They helped each other in design and navigation.  They started to see the benefits of the constructions that we were doing previously without the software program.  The 'Norton approved'  think out loud approach to showing them the software  was definitely the best approach.