I will be presenting two micro sessions at Unleashing Learning today: Getting Started with Math Techbook from 1:25- 1:45 and Formative Assessment with Plickers from 2:05 - 2:25, both at Table 1. 

Come join me!

OAPT Conference overview and sundry nifty physics things I've been working on

I'm writing this on the train back from the OAPT conference hosted at the University of Western Ontario, and it was, of course, amazing. I have so many thoughts and new great ideas to put into practice. Some quick takeaways: 

• thinking about using improv techniques in class to overcome my (and students') implicit bias, especially "Yes, and?"
• "We use mathematics to help us make the physics more precise."
• "Just because I don't have a 'math brain' doesn't mean I don't have something useful to contribute."
• "You're not part of a group, you're part of a team."
• Yes, the students do really need to draw a picture
• Why haven't we been using the rotunda at Jarvis to make super-long pendula?

Also, this happened:

Who's got two thumbs and just won a full registration to #stao2018? Thanks #oapt2018! pic.twitter.com/AMR74RKr4c

— Ms McPhee (JarvisCI) (@ms_mcphee) May 11, 2018

I think I'm going to have to wait until June to do the write-up justice.  I will share my presentation on Tweaking the Traditional Lab below; a link to various files and resources is posted in the resources section of this blog.


(Incidentally, one of the things I always like to mention when I'm introducing myself at presentations is how amazing the PD is on Twitter. The chart on the first slide is a perfect example. Elizabeth Houwen (a math teacher, incidentally) posted it last June, and I thought it would be a great way to get the students to practice unit conversions as well as estimation, and we also got a nice little lab out of it and an anchor chart so they have "reasonable" speeds to compare their answers to. All from one small tweet!)

***

I've been busy converting my drill sheets practice sheets, which I mentioned in my last post) into Google sheets, as well as creating new ones. I'm fairly proud of the chemical nomenclature one (in part because I just found out how to write superscript and subscript numbers in Sheets, so the clunky ^3 _4 notation is mostly gone), but I really want to share the electromagnetic right-hand rules ones.

I made these using the =image() function, which allows you to put an image directly into a cell (and not just overlay the image on top). Unfortunately, you can't use the shared url of images on your Google drive (which is odd and annoying).

I'll probably refine the mixed version so that it's a little more clear what you need to find in each question; I'm not sure a student would recognize immediately that they need to find the direction of the action of the magnet for 1 and the location of the north pole for 6.

You can find these and a lot more randomized practice sheets at my course website; click on the practice sheets link under Resources.

Incidentally, sometime between last December and April, Google changed the formatting of "publish to pdf" for Sheets so that it's landscape instead of portrait. There doesn't seem to be a way to modify this, and it's really mucked up my formatting. Everything is spread over two pages, and don't get me started about what it did to my spectroscopy sheets.

Please let me know if you find these useful!

Need spectrography and HR diagram drill sheets? Here you go!

In ongoing PD news, you can still register for the Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit; 9 videos, 9 days. The videos will be available until Dec. 31. Follow the fun at #ditchsummit on Twitter.

I'm still trying to put together my blogs for the fall PD I've been doing, but for now I wanted to share a few things I'm really excited that I figured out how to do.

Inspired by Robert Prior many years ago, I started coding a lot of Excel spreadsheets as randomized drill sheets on many topics. My goal for this year is to get most of them up as Google Sheets so I can publish them to the web and students can go straight to my website to print out an infinite number of sheets.

Anyway, I've also been working on adding new, richer sheets to my catalogue. In particular, I was very jazzed last year when I figured out how to get a spreadsheet to draw spectrographs (hint: error bars). And last night I spent far too long working on how to get a Hertzsprung-Russel diagram (yay for the Bubble chart, boo for the fact that the labels are arbitrarily hidden when you go to a larger font).

Behold, I give you my Spectrograph and HR diagram drills for the grade 9 space unit (and Earth and Space science, too).

I'm still working on the HR diagram answers; I have to figure out how best to get it to choose whether it's on the main sequence or not. Also, I think I need more white dwarf stars, because that area is looking pretty sparse.

However:

 If you'd like to see my other drill sheets, head on over to the drill sheet section of my course webpage. It's very much a work in progress. I have a lot more sheets than I've listed there.

Standing and Talking: a first attempt

Note: Google Camp 5.0 will be Saturday, Nov. 4. Registration is open for TDSB teachers on K2L. This event always sells out, so register soon! If you're interested in presenting, submissions are open until Monday, Oct. 2. The TDSB's Renewing Math Summit will be Friday, Dec. 1; you can still submit a proposal until Sept. 30. Yes, that's today. Hurry!

When I did my physics honours specialist with John Caranci way back when, he told us that one of the easiest ways to become a great teacher is to try or adopt one new technique per month. Well, I'm still working on that (I probably average 3-4 a year), but this year I'm going to really make the effort to try them several times per month.

I've already made the first change by getting the students used to grouped tables -- a bit challenging in one of my classrooms which has fixed benches, but I'm trying to make it work -- and I started my October technique a bit early because I couldn't wait.

I was inspired by this blog post by Sara Van Der Werf to try a Stand and Talk with my grade 11 mixed math students last week. To summarize, the old-style "share with your neighbour/elbow-partner/TPS" doesn't really work most of the time. Sara has found that getting the students to stand up and walk across the room to talk to another person and giving each pair a paper with something to look at with the instruction "notice 10/20/50 things about this" really increases student engagement. Her post is excellent, with specific instructions on how to make it successful and a lot of math examples to use.

(By the way, the link to the "rumors" group learning routine at the end of Sara's blog post would be great for the prediction part of POE or for review.)

I thought mapping diagrams would be a good place to try this. We'd looked at domain and range and function/NAF. I prepared this picture for them to look at and notice at least 10 things (yes, it's supposed to be a big number).

This is my revised version

Did it work? Mostly. I wound up grabbing the wrong folder and left the students' copies of the diagrams in my office, but I did put them up on the screen. Not ideal, because on my original version the arrow heads were not as obvious and I used too small a font for the sets of points and the labels, so they were a bit hard to read from the back of the room. There was a bit of "I don't know what she wants, do you know what she wants?" at the beginning, but after I encouraged them to go for the obvious first and used Sara's prompts ("I should see you pointing," "What do you wonder?" "Everything on the screen is there for a reason. What else to you notice?"),  I heard some good discussions. And once we were talking as a class, I had volunteered suggestions right away instead of the usual silence.

Some of the suggestions:

• there are circles on the page
• there are numbers in the circles
• the numbers go from negative to positive in both of the left circles
• there are no negative numbers in the right circles
• the numbers go in order
• there are 4 numbers in one left circle and 3 in the other
• both right circles have 3 numbers

I was a bit surprised that nobody mentioned the arrows, but that could be because the arrow heads wee small and didn't really register, but when I pointed out that there were arrows, more suggestions came in thick and fast:

• an arrow goes from the -3 to the 3
• another arrow goes from the -2 to the 1 (etc)
• two arrows go to the 3 in both right circles
• there are two arrows going from the -1 in one circle, but all the rest have only one arrow

Nobody noticed the connection to the coordinate pairs above the diagrams, but I think that is because the font was too small and they didn't really notice it. Once I asked "do you see a -3 anywhere else on the page?" the penny dropped.

• Oh! The arrow goes from -3 to 3, and there's a -3 and 3 together above. 
• Same with the -2 and 1.
• That first circle is all the first numbers and the second is all the second numbers

At this point I switched to Socratic questioning, and we established that the left circles were the x's, or domain, and the right circles were the y's, or range; none of the numbers were repeated and were in order from most negative to most positive; that one was a function and the other wasn't; and that you could tell whether it was a function or not by the number of arrows coming from each of the points in the domain. I then told them these were called mapping diagrams and had them create some from sets of points.

We stood the whole time we did this, and nobody complained. This was very surprising to me because there are a few students in that class who complain as a matter of principle, but who were actually mostly engaged in the activity and even offered a suggestion or two.

So will I be using stand and talks again? You bet. I'm already scheming my next picture. I love the way I could work concept attainment^* into the notice and wonder. I need to make I also focus on the "what do you wonder" questions. The diagrams do require a bit of thought first, so I'm aiming to do two per month in my math classes to begin with and work up to once a week in all classes. I'm already planning on trying this as a way to introduce B-R diagrams, chemical formulas, and circuit diagrams later on in grade 9 science; and more immediately, rational vs irrational numbers, polynomials,  like vs unlike terms in grade 9 math; standing waves in physics; and different forms of the quadratic function in the mixed math. That will do to start with, I think!

^*I did my math honours specialist final project on concept attainment, and I keep meaning to work it into lessons whenever I can. Perhaps I'll do a blog post about it so I will remember to use it.