Barbie Zipline, Kasey Bell, and Desmos Geometry tool reflections

Reflecting back on the last school year, the best new activity I tried was Barbie zipline. I am blessed to have John Stevens as an instructional coach in my district. I did the prep work with the students and John helped me launch the Barbies. It was really fun, and I can’t think of a more real life way to show Pythagorean theorem and distance formula. It created a need for them to do the math. My IM1 team heard about it from the students, and so it was easier to convince them to do it next year. John has agreed to come back second semester and launch the Barbies with all six teachers!

This Summer I took a online class with Kasey Bell @shake up learning.com. Her course was fantastic, and gave me all the refreshers I needed to pass the level 2 Google certification Exam. I highly recommend it. Now I want to investigate being a Google innovator. I plan to talk to John about that. I’m not really sure what it’s all about.

Schools started on August 8th and I’m enjoying my new classes. It’s good to be back ! I’m teaching four regular IM1 classes and one repeat IM1-2 class. I recently started playing with the Desmos geometry tool. I loved it so much that I decided to do the constructions unit on it with my 1-2’s. I made a Desmos activity builder that included instructional videos. Unlike with regular compasses, I noticed that every student was able to do the constructions, and that it isn’t dependent on their fine motor skills. I think it’s more equitable for students.

We had the first quiz on Friday and it went great! Every student got between 80% to 100%, and I feel that the understanding was better than when using their compasses. Instead of spending lots of time learning to draw the constructions, I was able to ask them questions about their constructions and add checks/proofs to them. This is because the Desmos Geometry tool is so easy to use. I definitely plan to use this again in the future.

Exciting news, I recently found out that my article “ Using BreakoutEDU with ThingLink for review” will be coming out in the September CMC Communicator publication. This is a first for me, and I’m really looking forward to going to the CMC South conference in November with the IM1 team.

Reflections of 2017 and TMC17

Conferences, conferences ,and more conferences. EdTechTeam, CMC, CUE, and TMC. I counted 10 that I went to, or presented at this year. It’s probably too many, but I enjoyed every minute of it. I learned so much, and met so many amazing people.

But during the last week of school my mom got sick and everything came to a screeching halt. Reality set in. My brother and I took care of her for a month. We were really worried about her. I knew I was scheduled to present at TMC 17, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to happen. With much prayer and help from the family, my mom fully recovered!  I was able to go to TMC.

 I spent a week in Atlanta Georgia. It was very warm, and a beautiful place. I met a lot of great people, and went to some thought provoking sessions. A couple things that stuck with me were that I wanted to try Delta math, and although I didn’t attend Annie Perkins session, the name of her session “mathematicians are not  just old white guys “ stuck with me. My students are mostly of Hispanic descent, and I feel that it’s important for them to see people like themselves on my wall. I want them to see themselves as mathematicians.

I decided I wanted to put up a wall in my room with mathematicians of all colors and genders. I started a search on the Internet and was “shocked” to find that there was very little out there as far as posters of diverse mathematicians. How could this be true in 2017? Luckily a TMC participant showed me an amazing Google Drive file that had what I needed for my wall. I love catching my students looking at it, and reading it at random times during class!!