Problem of the Day

This year I have decided to take a twist on my problem of the day activity.  Every period I give students their own problem of the day for when they walk into my classroom.  Student answer the problem that is either related to a prerequisite skill needed for the day's lesson, or it has to do with reviewing the problem from yesterday.  As students are turning them in, I am slowly making small groups based on right, wrong, or other (small mistakes).  I then can reteach in small groups as other students are working on iPads (ixl or khan).

Last year I noticed most students would be intrinsically motivated to get the problem of the day correct.  However, I noticed there were a few students in one period who didn't care so much about putting their best effort towards solving this problem.  I was able to talk with a few teachers about ways to help those students find a purpose for the problem each day, and we decided to start using the correct slips as a raffle ticket.  Every month I have decided to pull a ticket from my raffle bin for some type of reward.  One of the teachers I worked with made these little blue sheets of paper for our students to use for the problem, and I thought it added a nice tough for our raffle.  

So far students seem to be excited about it, but I will let you know exactly how this works out once we have a raffle.

Using Educanon to Flip Your Clasroom

I have been semi-flipping my classroom for quite some time now.  I find great videos online and then send links to my students to watch as homework.  This allows the next day to serve as a workshop where I can both help and challenge students in my classroom.  One of my goals this year, is for myself to make the videos instead of finding them.  I do feel that many times the videos I find on Khan academy explain it better than I do, but there are other times where I feel there could be a better way to approach the content.  I also feel some of my students are more comfortable and prefer my own videos over Khan.  You should also know, most my students say they like that I switch the video sources every couple days, so that it's not the same person or voice teaching them that night in the video.  I will usually switch between Khan, myself, and other teacher made videos I find on educanon.  

If you haven't worked with educanon yet, it truly is something I'm starting to be a fan of.  They allow you to upload videos that you have created for your students.  You can then add questions in the middle of the videos for students to respond as they are watching the video.  This allows me to monitor their understanding as they are watching the video, and it also allows me to know if they actually watched the video at home.

Having students watch videos at home is allowing me to use my 44 minute period in a better way than I had been.  Students are able to move around the room working on different application activities.  I can plan more application and challenging activities that allow them to work in groups and talk about their reasoning with their peers inside the classroom.  

Here is a great example of how you can take videos and add questions for student responses.
Let me know how you use educanon in your classroom!