1:1 Laptop Roll-out & The New School Year

This past week at Brookings HS, we began to distribute laptops to the approximately 903 students set to enter the doors on the 25th.  Students are required to come to a "training" session in order to receive their laptops.  After three days of sessions, more than half of the students have their laptops.  For the most part, the roll-out process has gone very smoothly.

It was very helpful for Jarrod and I to pilot the laptop implementation in our classroom last year.  Many problems were alleviated.  The 1:1 laptop team and tech staff still had a number of items that needed to be ironed out throughout the planning process, but it has gone well.

Three final hurdles need to be cleared as the school year begins.
1.  The rest of the computers need to be distributed to the students.  There is a fear that a handful of students will flat out reject the computers and refuse to take one.  We're not exactly sure what to do if that's the case.

2.  The teaching staff needs to be trained on LAN School (our classroom management software).

3.  We need a day of school in which there is heavy internet usage to see how our network handles the increase in volume.


Speaking of the new school year, Jarrod and I are implementing a few changes to our team teaching model.  The first is that we will be using Google Classroom as our Learning Management System.  So long, Edmodo.  It's been a good ride.  But the ease of how Google Classroom distributes assignments and creates shared files with the students is too good to not use.

Secondly, we just saw our classroom numbers for our three sections of geometry.  Last year, our largest class when we brought both classroom together was 47 students.  This year, we're looking at 54.  I have a feeling that 54 is too many to comfortable fit into Jarrod's classroom at once.  We're going to test it out the first week and see how it goes.

Lastly, I am teaching two sections of Advanced Algebra 2 while Jarrod will be teaching two sections of Geometry Applied.  We still have mirrored schedules and will share our three geometry sections, but two hours a day we will be doing different things.

Let the fun begin!

One of the best rewards as a teacher

Being a teacher has many benefits and rewards - helping students reach the "A-HA" moment, summer break and holiday vacations, school lunch, etc.  But to me, one thing is more rewarding than anything else.

This evening I met up with two of my former students.  Both were strong math students; now both are going to be math teachers.

To me, nothing is more rewarding than knowing that I made a positive impact on a student and that he/she wants to be a math teacher as well.  I'm proud of these two gentlemen on a number of levels.  Best of luck to both of you!

Congrats to Mr. Peters!

This post is a quick shout out to Jared Peters, who recently landed his first teaching job.  Mr. Peters completed his student teaching requirement with us last spring and will be a great addition to our profession.  Best of luck, Jared!

Growth Mindset & the Smarter Balanced Assessment

I was first exposed to Carol Dweck's research on fixed and growth mindsets a few years ago when I was completing some of my graduate coursework.  For those of you who haven't heard about mindsets, you can find a lot of resources online (here and here to name a few).

Dweck's colleague, Jo Boaler, has completed some further research on mindsets and the implications in the classroom.   If you're really interested in learning about mindsets in a mathematics classroom, I would recommend taking Stanford's free online class (sign up here).

In Dweck's Self-Theories book, she discusses the reaction of students with a helpless mindset (fixed mindset) when they experience failure.  In short, when a student with a fixed mindset experiences failure they begin to fall into a helpless state of mind.  They quickly lose confidence in their abilities and lose perspective on the successes they had achieved in the past.  Moreover, many students who had fallen into the helpless mindset "abandoned or became incapable of deploying the effective strategies in their repertoire." (pg. 9)

After hearing that research, I grew concerned about students who have a fixed mindset and their ability to successfully complete the Smarter Balanced assessment.  The Smarter Balanced Assessment is a computer adaptive test.  Students are given grade-level questions for the first two-thirds of the test.  Then the computer software selects remaining one-third of the questions based on the student responses up to that point.  If a student is answering questions correctly, then the software can select questions from a higher grade level.  Conversely, if a student is answering questions incorrectly, then the software can select questions from a lower grade level.

Theoretically, this type of testing system makes sense.  It's designed to find the "boundary" of each students' achievement level.  My concern lies with the students with fixed mindsets.  For those students, the "boundary" is like an electric fence.  The test is designed for students to eventually touch the fence.  Once a student with a fixed mindset does touch it, the electrical current sends shocks throughout their body.  They lose ability to focus on the problems and are more focused on how much the fence shocked them.

Dweck summarizes her research by saying "...the helpless response is a reaction to failure that carries negative implications for the self and that impairs students' ability to use their minds effectively."  I fear the computer adaptive test could indirectly lead to major negative consequences for students with a fixed mindset.

What can we (teachers) do to help?

I think the best way to help combat this potential problem is to teach students about fixed and growth mindsets.  I am planning to introduce these ideas during the first week of school in all of my classes.  More to come as to what that will look like...



Dweck, Carol S. Self-theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality, and Development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology, 1999. Print.

It worked!

As you can see from my previous post, the email directly to blog post worked!  I’m very excited about this feature in blogger.

 

The way that Ramsey is implementing this in his classroom is he is having his students write blog posts (as reflections) at the end of each lesson / learning activity.  He has them write emails that post directly to their blogs.  Blog postings are typically part of their homework and students are expected to describe the learning activity and summarize what they’ve learned.  Students are also encouraged to ask questions about things they aren’t fully understanding.

 

I love this feature because it will allow students to use whatever they are comfortable emailing with to create their blog posts.

 

TIE Conference 2015

I am currently at the TIE Conference and learning some great new ideas.  One thing I just found out about was the ability to post to my blog by simply writing an email.  (Thanks to the Monday AM Keynote Ramsey Musallam!)

I believe I set this up correctly and am testing this newly discovered featured out.  I guess if you’re reading this, it worked!

How tall is the light pole?

In early March, Mother Nature was very cooperative with our lesson plans and we had a couple of 60 degree days.  We were in the middle of our similarity unit and wanted to get our geometry students outside for an activity.  My co-teacher and I had both done activities involving indirect measurement before in our previous schools, but we had both used clinometers and right triangle trigonometry as the vehicle.

This year, we decided to use mirrors and model our activity similar to the one shown here.

We modeled our lesson after Mr. Chuck Pack's lesson (from The Teaching Channel).  He does a much better job of explaining the activity on video than I could in writing.

The students loved getting outside and the day was a success.  Most importantly, students demonstrated strong understanding of the concept of indirect measurement and experienced it firsthand.

3.11.15 - Brookings HS

The indirect measurement activity using mirrors worked very well.

The one thing I really loved about Mr. Pack's activity that I had never thought of doing was collecting the data and tie in some data analysis / statistics into the day.  It's inevitable that at least one group make some major errors in their measurements or calculations.  Outliers and the effect an outlier has on the mean is begging to be discussed.  TI-Nspire does a very nice job of displaying the data from our three classes in the scatterplot. Great idea, Mr. Pack!

Next year, we're planning to improve our activity in two ways.  

1)  We used meter sticks and yard sticks to measure our distances along the ground.  Next year, we will hopefully have 100-ft tape measures.  It will be interesting to see if our data has less variation.

2) We are planning to use clinometers as well next year after our trigonometry unit.  We can then potentially use our mirror data and compare it to the clinometer data.  

If anyone has ideas of some statistical analysis type activities we can do to extend the lesson next year, please reply below.  I am especially interested in stats connections to the CCSS.