Intentionally Sharing the Good and Bad

     This year, my goal is to share more. I want people to see what my students are doing and to recognize their accomplishments. With that being said, I am finding myself playing the role of a "photo journalist" more and more. My students are becoming more comfortable with sharing their work with others both inside and outside the classroom, and that is a "win" for me. This also means that I need to be better about sharing what I'm doing in the classroom too. So, here is what we've been up to today.

     In math today, we used Plickers. If you are not familiar with Plickers, it is a website and an app that works GREAT in classrooms with no devices (or not one-to-one devices). Students are given cards that are free to print off of the plickers.com website, and they use these cards as QR codes to solve different problems that you create on the website. When the students solve the problem on the screen, they raise their QR code in the direction that corresponds with the letter that they are choosing, and the teacher scans the room with the iPad. The iPad will pick up everyone's letter answer and will tell you what percentage of your students chose the correct answer.

     I am always trying to find ways to spice my math warm-ups up, so I decided that this could be a good avenue for my students and I to take. I made a few questions, and I demoed them with my math Scout Time kids. I found that I had made some mistakes in my questions, so I was able to fix those mistakes before debuting the activity to my big algebra class. For the most part, things went well. The only issue I encounter ed was that the cards that I printed off from the site didn’t match up the letters with the letters that my iPad read. I was kind of freaking out, because the iPad was reading that most of my students were not getting the questions right. We figured out that their letters were not the same ones that the iPad was reading. I’m still not really sure what happened there, but even with the confusion, I’d be willing to give this activity another go. I was really fumbling around in class today, but I think next time should go smoother.