Girl Math

I learned about Plickers a few years ago from a speaker that was presenting at Meredith College.  He was amazing, and I cannot remember his name (of course).  During his lecture, he mentioned Plickers and I (being the nerd I am) immediately Googled it.  It took me to a video that I watched with my colleagues- and I was hooked!  If you're interested, here is an extensive video that goes into detail of all that is Plickers.   To skip the tutorial, I'll do a run down for you... Plickers are basically "clickers" without the hassle of a tech guy.  Each student takes a card with a code on it and with answers either A, B, C, or D.  You pose your question to the class (either via slides or through the Plicker website) and the students hold up their answer choice while the teacher scans each code across the room.  Boom.  Just like that, you have 37 student responses in under 30 seconds.  Because this is a web-based tool, there is no ne...

On the first day of Calculus - we have homeroom! That means, I only have one hour of class. That's not enough time to get through procedural class info and a typical lesson. So, I started looking around for a fun activity that would introduce future concepts. I came across this blog post ! I was so excited to find the activity and have been using this lesson for about 2 - 3 years. I absolutely love it!!!! You can download as a Word Document from her post. I added the Google version of her activity at the bottom of this post.  After going over some procedural classroom information, I put the kiddos in groups of 3 and handed them the paper. I just observed and walked around - I did NOT assist at all!   First of all - the conversations are amazing! To hear students on the first day of school arguing how to solve a problem - makes me so happy!  Second - this takes the idea of a previously learned concept to help solve the more complicated Calculus concepts...

I may be a little late on this (only about 3 months), but summer rolled around and the last thing I wanted to do was think about grading, curriculum, PD, etc.  Did I mention that we live at the beach? Back to the point: I have a pretty great menu-style final project that I use for AP Statistics.  For a copy of the student document and rubric, use this link .   As you can see from the photo, students were really able to choose not only the topics that interests them, but also the format for submission.  Quite frankly, we use Google Slides often for turning in projects and assignments, so I took that off of the list.  Some ideas for final publications are: Padlet, Prezi, create a game, Canva, and a few more.   Here's the gist...  Appetizer: students choose a topic that interests them  Soup or Salad: they must gather data from an appropriate source via a method discussed in class  Entree: once the data has been collected, stud...