The Math Coach

This week I played around with Quizizz in all of my classes and my students loved it.  They mainly just liked the memes, but I mean come on, who doesn't like to get a congratulatory meme after getting a question right?? My favorite part about Quizizz is how I could track my students progress and go over mistakes with them before they retook it.  I will be using this many more times this year as a formative assessment tool and as a review for tests since I can upload my own test questions onto my own Quizizz. Just when I thought I had found all the formative assessment tools out there, in comes Flippity.  Last week I presented EquatIO to the class in the Slides assignment and the combination of this in my Google Sheets and Flippity is going to make quick formative assessments a breeze.  I had a few issues at first though, and I want to share the steps to fix it with anyone interested in using it.  So for starters, you need to download EquatIO  so go do that now.  Next, you

It was homecoming this week and I had a blast dressing up for our spirit days!  This year, we had: I rocked my stars and stripes suit on Monday as Captain America.  Tuesday I taught in shorts *gasp* and a Hawaiian shirt.  Wednesday I donned a fake mustache and was Ron Swanson but the hair above my lip turned out to be a little distracting so I had to take it off.  And Thursday I bused out my purple pants and wore purple head to toe to support my Wildcats.  High School students get Friday off to build floats for the Homecoming parade.  Here are a couple pictures of the winning floats! It was a pretty successful week of teaching considering all of the distractions and I also found some a new Google Classroom feature I want to use next week during class. Before I get to that feature, I want to add in an update on Adobe Spark.  I used Spark to create a collages of my students' projects and upload that to my class website. Here's how they turned out: I shared the

Don't you love accidental discoveries?  I mean can we imagine our life without these accidental discoveries ?  I listened to a podcast once that talked about beer being the most important accidental discovery but that's probably not too appropriate for a teacher blog.  Anyway, the point of this is that while researching the different features of Edmodo, Schoology, and Google Classroom for class this week, I made an accidental discovery of an site linked with Classroom that might change how I provide feedback in my classes. Enter Kaizena! I stumbled across this while researching the different ways to provide feedback in the three sites.  I didn't get very far into Edmodo and Schoology because once I saw Kaizena I was hooked.  I won't waste too much time going over how to set it up because I'll provide a video for that below.  What I will say are the two words that have me so excited to use Kaizena: audio feedback.  I was first interested in this when my instru

This week had a lot of new resources to help on my quest to grow as a math teacher.  So many resources in fact, that I kept getting side tracked and instead of completing my Baker assignments, I was adapting the strategies I was finding in order to use them in my own classroom.  This means that I am scrambling to finish up the last pieces of my assignments while I'm in Wichita Falls, TX for a Labor Day meet-up with my girlfriend. This week started with me getting back on my Diigo  account.  I say, "getting back on" because I actually used Diigo in an Integrating Technology in the Classroom class I took as an undergrad student.  This class was over 4 years ago so a lot has changed on Diigo since my last visit.  My absolute favorite new feature was Diigo Discover.  This new addition allowed me to search through education related articles shared by the Diigo community and it didn't take long for me to find one I used in my class.  I found an article relating happiness