Arts Education

I have sort of lucked into a great group of math coaches in the Greater Cleveland area . They meet once a month to tackle math pedagogy. I have only attended two meetings, but I have left both meetings with new ideas and feeling invigorating for implementing a version of them in my classroom. Last week's meeting introduced me to a new way to organize students into teams or groups. Students in my classes sit with their groups at tables every day in class. I change the groups after every two units, every 6-7 weeks or so. I use a pretty elaborate process to organize who works with whom, but sometimes random groups are faster and feel more fair to students. This allows for random grouping, based on content taught in a course. For groups of four, find four related concepts that pertain to your content. The math example was the equation of a line, the graph of that line, the T-chart of some x and y values for the line, and a situation that the line could describe. Create as many of those...

This is the first post I am writing in response to a blogging initiative launched by the MathTwitterBlogoSphere (#MTBoS). I am a week late in getting started, but I hope there aren't tardy detentions. This week we are supposed to blog about something we would call "my favorite." For me, this is one of my favorite ways to differentiate instruction. When I think about differentiating in my high school classroom, I have two main worries. First, how will I manage different problems or activities? Second, how will I encourage all my students to work on their problems or activities without being mad that they did or didn't get the same problems as their neighbor. To solve both of those problems, I use a Google Form to differentiate. The trick is to create separate pages within the Google form. Instead of adding questions, I add page breaks. Then I create questions and check the box (next to the multiple choice answers) that says "Go to page based on answer." If th...

We wanted to kids to make a video. We wanted it to be easy and fast. We wanted the focus to be on chemistry and not on learning a tool. And we wanted the video to include a video of a chemical demonstration. We considered Explain Everything, but it's complicated. Too easy to get bogged down and miss the point of our lesson. Enter the [FREE] iOS IPEVO Whiteboard app . I use this app a lot for giving notes and doing guided practice. I have described it several times as having just the right number of bells and whistles. I felt like after about 15 minutes of play, I was confident to use it in class. Tap the question mark in the corner and you get a quick tip screen of what every tool will do: Just want to mirror you iPad and show your class how to do something? It does that beautifully. Want to import a document or image and write on top? It's got you covered. Need to make a screencast of what you did in class for kids who were absent? That's easy. Want to take a picture and ...

I loved my high school chemistry teacher. That's an important place to begin. I was mesmerized by every lesson, every concept. Chemistry seemed like magic. But not phony don't-look-too-close magic. Real actual magic. The ideas captivated me, but the math slowed me down. My teacher often posed a problem, gave us time to work on it, and then logic-ed his way to the answer. He talked about mathematical relationships with a fluency that I didn't develop into well into college and I found myself floundering, often, as I tried to apply what I learned. When I student taught, my cooperating teacher had a very discrete way everything would be done. I stood in front of the class, but he had very much scripted what I was supposed to say. So it was with teaching stoichiometry, the mathematical relationships between substances in a chemical equation. He required me to teach it in a specific way, using the dimensional analysis or factor-label system of canceling units. The way I am descr...

Earlier this month I mentioned that I think teachers are masters at taking something that is made for one purpose or subject or age group and making it work for a totally different one. So it is with Osmo . Santa brought my daughter an Osmo - a small base, a little mirror that sits on top of an iPad camera, and 5 apps that come with accessories for learning and creation. Osmo is designed for kids ages 5 and up, but I immediately wanted to try it out in a high school classroom.  From the moment the Osmo comes out of the package, you will be impressed. The brightly colored packaging is sleek and magnetic and nests together. The design of the base and camera are simple and elegant. The toys pack up so nice and neatly. There are two ways to buy it. The Starter Kit ($79) contains the base and mirror plus the letter tiles for the Words app and the puzzle pieces for Tangram. The Genius Kit ($99) includes those items and the number tiles for Numbers. The Osmo app that I think has the broad...

Classkick is one of my favorite iOS apps for using instant feedback to guide students as they practice a new skill or process. Classkick allows teachers to create assignment slides quickly and, through a code, share them with students. As students complete the assignments, the teacher can watch them work in real time. Teachers and students can provide help and feedback. This week Classkick added a great new feature - the ability to view the assignments from any internet-enabled device. Classkick Viewer lives on the web. Input the class code for the assignment and the name you used to complete it (or the name of a student who completed it) and you can view all the work on that assignment.  This could be handy in a variety of ways. The most powerful is that a student can access their work after class. In my classroom, we use a class set of iPads to complete these assignments. When the students leave, their work remains behind, so I always make them write it down in the app and als...

I always say that teachers are masters at taking something that was not designed for education and making it work for something in a classroom. For that reason, I wonder if all educators look at the holidays as a special time to discover new things for their classrooms. My children complain when I ask them to pass me a box so I can take look because they know that I want to play with it before they get a chance. So it was this week with Bunchems ! A Bunchem is a small plastic puff that is covered with small hooks, kind of like a spherical velcro ball.  The little hooks mean you can attach them to other bunchems and build things simply by touching two bunchems together. The possibilities of what you can make seem endless, limited only by what you can imagine and gravity. In addition to the bunchems, the kits also contain some accessories - legs, hats, and so on - that will give your creations extra pizzazz. My daughter's Mega Pack was open for about 15 seconds before I had my hand i...

Almost twenty years ago my family opted to stop buying traditional Christmas gifts and start making Christmas gifts. The decision to do this came at the junction of two things: my mom had lost her Christmas spirit when her brother died close to the holiday and we had become a family of adults who were fully capable of buying what we wanted all year. It started as a one-year challenge, but we had so much fun that first year, we have been doing it ever since. Here's what people made this year: As pretty as the Mason jar candle that my mom made is, I wish you could smell it. I will love to burn it but hate to see it go. My older sister made hot chocolate mix and homemade marshmallows. Before I saw these, it never even occurred to me that marshmallows could be made at home! She always has the best product packaging too - look at those great labels! My younger sister made super groovy Christmas ornaments. These beautiful, glittery balls involved Mop-n-Glo as an ingredient! One of my ste...