Join me at OAME 2021, May 17-21

 OAME 2021 is completely virtual this year, and I'm excited to be presenting two sessions. The pre-recorded session will be a version of Rope-a-Slope: Inquiry in Grade 9 Math, updated to work for face-to-face, socially distanced, and virtual learning. Despite being pre-recorded, it will still be asynchronously interactive should you wish to play along at home, and there will be a Google doc to post questions afterwards. The recording will be available Wednesday, May 19 at 1 pm EST until June 11.

The live session is Fidgets and Forks: Modelling Periodic Motion in Real Time for grades 11-12 math. Come and play with fidget spinner data, tuning fork data, heart beats, pendulums, and how to get students to capture their own data. If you can't make the date of Thursday, May 20 at 4 pm EST (or any of the other live sessions), the session will be recorded and the recording will be available until June 11.

Register now! (Or check with your principal to see if your school has a group code.)

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!

Assignment Submission Forms

Did you miss the Ditch Textbook Summit last month? Matt Miller has reopened access to all 35 videos from January 10 to 18. There's some great stuff there, including downloadable notes and certificates of completion. Click here to sign up. If you miss it, you'll have to wait until next December.

I gave a (slightly overlong) webinar to a group of TDSB teachers about Google Drive in December, and one of the things I mentioned is that the "Shared With Me" folder is.... well, it can be a bit of a mess. Mine is, at any rate, and last year I was finding it more and more challenging to find and then systematically open any documents students shared with me, especially since I told them to deselect the "Notify me" option when sharing. I told the webinar group I would blog about how I use Forms and a Sheet to make my life easier.

Very simply: when students write up an assignment (using Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.), they share the link with me (making sure I have edit access so I can view their revision history and make comments). I've put the link to the form on the course webpage, and also in the body of the assignments.

I have the settings set to collect their email addresses (which in the TDSB includes their first and last names), so I don't bother asking for that separately.  I have a drop-down menu which is populated using the formRanger add-on for the assignment name, but you can just keep adding to it in the form itself. Then all they need to do is copy the link for their document. I set up response validation to "url" so that I get a clickable link in the response spreadsheet. I only have one section of each of these courses this year, so I've deleted that question from my forms to keep it simple.

Under Presentation, I select "Show link to submit another response", and I always write a personal confirmation message. For this form, it is "Thanks! Your assignment has been submitted to Ms. McPhee. You can continue to make changes to it until the due date." I've got some students who want to submit the url at the beginning of the assignment and some who prefer to wait until they're finished, and this works for both.

Under Responses, I select the response destination to be a spreadsheet. I've got all my submission forms going to the same spreadsheet so I only have to go to one sheet, but you can make a separate sheet for each form if you like. 

In the response spreadsheet, I created a new tab called "Marked?" and use the query function to bring the data into the new tab: in A1, put

=query('Form responses 1'!A1:E)

I then add a new column called Marked? at the end, and use Insert → Tick Boxes to populate the cells with tick boxes.

If you want to sort into different sheets by section or even by assignment, then create a tab for each one and then use the following query in A1 of each tab:

=query('Form responses 1'!A1:E,"Select * where C = 'section-code-here'",1)

or

=query('Form responses 1'!A1:E,"Select * where D = 'assignment-name'",1)

where 'section-code-here'/'assignment-name' matches one of the values in your section or assignment questions. Here is a video explaining how to sort form responses using Query if you want to get fancy. (Warning: the tick boxes will be static, so if you reorder the rows or do some filtering by date or section or what-have-you, the boxes will stay ticked or unticked and won't move with the rest of the row.)

When I mark the assignments, I just click on the link to open their document. I usually have a spreadsheet rubric open in a side-by-side window, so it's easy for me to go back and forth, and it's really easy for me to tick off that I have marked an assignment and open the next student's. I can also add little comments to myself on each assignment in the cells to the right of the tick boxes.

I know Google Classroom is set up to not need all this, but I've only started using Google Classroom properly with one class this year, and I'm not loving the way they do assignments from my end. It could be because I'm not as familiar with how it works yet, but I think my solution works better for me. YMMV.

My next step is to set up a link to this in my assignment tracker sheets so it will automatically show whether they have submitted an assignment.

Note: you could have them submit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, pdfs, jpgs, etc the same way, except that instead of a short-answer question, choose File upload. The files will get uploaded to a subfolder in the Drive containing this form, and you'll get a link to the file in the spreadsheet as before.

Here is a copy of a sample assignment submission form (including a file upload question, which I don't actually use) and the associated response spreadsheet, which is also where formRanger finds the assignment names.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Upcoming (Really Soon!): Google Camp 6.0

TDSB Google Camp 6.0 is next Saturday. It's sold out, naturally, but if you are lucky enough to go, I'll be presenting three sessions in room 218.

Session 1 is an updated and expanded version of Taking Math Digital with Desmos, Geogebra, and Equatio. Come explore tools that can make investigation in math, science, and STEM easy and fun. The Desmos graphing calculator, in particular the activity builder and activities such as Card Sort, Polygraph, and Marbleslides, is a valuable tool that makes helping students explore math concepts easy and interactive. Geogebra is a GSuite and user-friendly version of Geometer's Sketchpad. We will also talk about the updates to the Chrome extension EquatIO, helps write your math using predictive text, handwriting, and speech input, not to mention integration across all GSuite platforms.

Update: John McGowan, the creator of EquatIO, will be doing a Global Math webinar this coming Tuesday to talk about Digital Math Flow with EquatIO, Desmos, and Google. How timely!

In session 2, I will be giving an updated version of Flipping the Learning. This session will show you what a flipped lesson looks like, and how I am currently integrating flipped lessons into my math and physics classes. We will discuss the pros and cons, how it can be used for differentiated learning, and how to increase buy-in. In addition, we will discuss the technical aspects of flipping, specifically the specialized flipping platform EDpuzzle (but you can keep it as simple as YouTube and Google Forms). If you watch the video ahead of time, you will get the opportunity to delve deeper into some of the nifty features of EdPuzzle and have your first curated video ready for Monday's class!

In session 4, I'll be presenting How Random! Infinite Possibilities Using Sheets, which will talk about how to make the randomized practice sheets that are my pride and joy.  Sheets is useful for so much more than just accounting and graphs! Learn how the random number functions can be used to automagically create vocabulary lists, math problems, matching exercises, and yes, graphs... the possibilities are quite literally endless. Want to create a random question of the day? Sheets! Want the answer key, too? Sheets! Even better, you can link them to other GSuite products such as Docs, Slides, or Drawings to make collaboration easy. Sample templates will be provided so you can have a finished product ready to go for Monday's class.

It'll be a busy day, with lots of great workshops to choose from. If you can't make it to one of mine, I'll put links to the resources.

Hope to see you there!

Upcoming: STAO 2018

I'm excited to be presenting at STAO this year. I'll be giving an updated version of my OAPT talk: Beyond the Traditional Lab: Tips and Tweaks for Critical Thinking. It will have a definite physics slant, but the ideas can be applied to all sciences.

The talk will be on Thursday, November 8 at 3:30 pm. You can register for the conference at www.stao.org.

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.