2 Truths & Lie

Today I was working on my Lessons for my Geometry students, I found myself trying to come up with better ways to show their knowledge.  I have used 2 truths and a lie as a get to know you activity before in the beginning of the school year, but today was the first time I thought about doing that concept in my lesson.  I am a paperless classroom but I believe that students sharing and discussing is very important to their success. I use Google Slides to present my material to my students and below you will see the template that I made today.

While making the template I was thinking about the ways I would be able to use it with many different units.   My students are about to be working with Similar Polygons, so I decided to add the template to the lesson that I was working on tonight.  I decided I would teach them the concept of 2 truths and lie with a pretty simple yet important concept.  Here is what I came up with:

I think that the Screen shot explains that I added it to my lessons before the Ticket for Understanding bc I want to make sure that my students are efficient in similarity.  After doing this tonight, I have gotten the idea that in all of the lessons I am going to add something similar to this maybe a template for finding an error in a problem and correcting it, some like be the teacher.  Stay Tune....

XOXO

Lynda 

Teaching with Bitmojis

Being the mom of two teenagers, I thought Bitmojis were just fun on social media, SnapChatting friends with funny saying.  One thing that I have learned about teaching is that if you let the kids do cool things even if they are doing with Math with them, they will enjoy it.  So I decided to make that my first lesson, we started in class on the first day of school, and the students finished it for homework on the first day of school.  If your homework is making Bitmojis it hardly seems like homework. My colleague and I made a template of emotions that would have to do with learning geometry: frustrated, happy, overwhelmed, proud, confused.  The students were not told why they were making them, so we made a template that included an example from each of us and a place for their bitmoji as well.  We included in the Google Classroom post, the link to the Bitmoji Google Chrome Extension as well as the link to the website Bitmoji.com.   I will attach a copy of the assignment that I placed in Google Classroom and here is a picture of my post.

The Directions of the assignment are shown in the screenshot below and the students had a total of 12 emotions to do.  The teacher examples were meant to be funny but accurate to how someone might feel when doing their geometry.  This assignment was a great opening to my class and how somedays you feel like you are doing well and some days you do not feel like understanding the lesson will ever happen. 

The students feedback about the assignment is important.  During the assignment they do not understand that the Bitmojis will be used for expression about Geometry.  After each lesson,  we include a self assessment for the students to express how they feel about the topic or standard.  I will post some examples of the Self Assessments for a different post.  Over all this is one thing I will keep in my teacher toolbox, it works, it is up to date with the times, the kids seem to enjoy it and it is a great lesson for them to learn how to submit into Google Classroom. 

XOXO

Lynda

Teacher Life

I have good intentions all the time, but teacher time is hard to find in a very busy life.  I started Google Classroom last spring and learned lots.  I made many mistakes but learned so much from them.  I finally got my set of  student chromebooks, and they are so amazing.  Last year I struggled with old laptops but believed in the electronic platform and used them everyday.  Today we have been in school for 2017-1018 school year 9 weeks and the Chromebooks have not been an issue one day.  Well okay, maybe the day I forgot to charge them.  I have transitioned from giving my High School math students sometimes 7 or 8 papers a day to NOT one sheet of paper.  In fact, during the first nine weeks of this year, I gave out a newsletter when I met my students nothing else so far.  I am not doing this to be paperless, I am doing it for it to be AWESOME to my students.  They can literally turn in their assignments from their bed at night.  I am going to make a promise to myself right now that I will try and post weekly and sometimes more depending on what is happening in my class.  Teacher Time often keeps me going along with my two children.  My son is a 20 year old college Jr and my daughter is a 15 year old hs sophomore.  I enjoy learning in fact I like to call myself a Life Long Learner, so I am going to blog about what I learn in my classroom.

XOXO
Lynda