student blogging Archives

22 Dec 2016

Entry 17 – Needing Math Teachers Willing To Comment on Student Blogs

It's Thursday of the first week of Christmas break. Thought I'd reflect a bit on something new I tried in this last week of the semester. STUDENT MATH BLOGS My school is an International Baccalaureate (IB) school. In IB schools, students write an Internal Assessment (IA) in math their junior and senior year; a thesis on an exploration of some mathematical concept. While preparing middle schoolers for the upcoming IA is part of why I have students writing about math in math class, the bigger reason is to give me a way to assess their conceptual understanding; can they explain a…

18 Apr 2016

Week 30 – Student Led Conferences, Math Blogs, & Filmmaking

STUDENT-LED CONFERENCES We didn't have classes Thursday and Friday of this past week in order to make time for student-led conferences. I was going to write out all the details about student-led conferences and realized that I already did that earlier this year in THIS post. Just about everything is the same except this time I revised the reflection sheet a little bit. The previous reflection sheet had them rate their behavior in every class but most students were just like 'well, my behavior is about the same in every class' so I replaced that part with a section where…

09 Apr 2016

Week 29 – Proportions Tests, Percent Introductions, and Tax Day

This week we finished up proportions in Pre-Algebra and got introduced to percents in Math Skills. Also had several teacher visitors who are applying for the open math position at our school (our other math teacher is moving to Brazil to teach). Oh, and it was tax day in our classroom economy, PRE-ALGEBRA We finished up proportions this week with discussing similar figures and how we use proportions to solve them. As a review activity, I gave them a quiz that I used last year. They worked on it together and we went over it. The following was probably the…

19 Sep 2015

Week 4 – Student Blogging & Creating Video Games

We've come to the end of week 4. It felt like the first full week of actual school with last weeks 4-day-week and the week before still doing beginning of the year stuff. We really got into student blogging this week. MATH REFLECTION BLOGS Last year I did math reflection journals in Google Slides that I had kids share with me. This year, they're blogging their journals. I'm hoping a wider audience will lead to high quality in writing. I had them blog about our first math lessons. I provided a few guiding questions to get them going, used a math reflection…

31 Jul 2015

Assessment FOR Learning vs. Assessment OF Learning

Recently read an article from EDge titled ‘Assessment For Learning.’ The biggest push of the article was that assessment is most often used as a measure of what has been learned at the end of a unit (assessment OF learning) and then you move onto the next topic. It can be a pretty defeating experience for those who fail and don't have much chance to really learn what they were supposed to learn. They cite research on the positive effects on assessment used FOR learning; something like a pre-assessment or assessment in the middle of a concept. It's effectiveness is…