Online Math Resources

I’ve always felt like it was hard to find good math resources online.  Sure, if you want a worksheet, your options are nearly limitless, but when you want a worthwhile, free, standards-based supplement for your curriculum, it’s sometimes hard to find.  I’d like to add a disclaimer before I go on. In the 2019-2020 school year, every SUSD student should receive rigorous tier one instruction that maintains the integrity of our newly adopted curriculum.  Since most of us are new to this material, I believe we should do our best to use what is provided by the publisher. All of the websites I’m including in this post should be considered a teacher resource.  For example, Khan Academy can be used by adults to deepen their understanding. It should not replace instruction.

Recently, someone shared an article with me that I found to be very helpful. In this link are over 60 websites for teaching and learning math.  I’d like to share the ones that are free for teachers and (in my opinion) will be most useful for Stockton Unified School District staff.  I’m also throwing in a few that are not on the list.

My long-time favorite has to be Khan Academy.  With video tutorial content that can be assigned by the teacher to individuals or the entire class that are standards-aligned, this resource works great for a flipped classroom, as an intervention, or for acceleration. Students can access all content (not just what is assigned) at any time, using almost any device. There is even a version for preschoolers now called Khan Academy Kids. Math content goes all the way up through college level courses and can be customized to follow grade level standards or align to PSAT and SAT needs.  Another website that offers something similar is Freckle.  It has a diagnostic and customizes practice to meet student needs.  A third option is Moby Max.  This website has a paid version that provides more features.  Even more sites that deliver something of this type include Math Help and Splash Math.

In the past, I’ve seen how the Chromebooks can become babysitters while kids play on websites like Cool Math Games, Fun Brain, Sheppard Software or Math Game Time. If I’m being honest, even Prodigy Game is more game than it is learning.  That’s not to say that these don’t have a place in the classroom at all.  In my opinion, they should be relegated to rainy day recess activities because they are games.  Another option would be to tell students to play these games for homework. If we assign specific practice that students actually need, they’d get more out of these programs and they’d probably be more likely to do their homework if it involved playing a game instead of completing a worksheet. One website that goes a little bit further than just providing games is Math Playground. In addition to having games, it also has logic puzzles, instructional videos, and a “Story Math” section that models word problems with step-by-step solutions.

If you’re interested in playing math-themed music videos for your students, Flocabulary and Numberock have free songs that kids enjoy.  If you want a neat site for online fluency practice, Xtramath might be what you are looking for.  Many of the websites I’ve listed provide a variety of resources in addition to the pieces I’ve mentioned and I encourage you to click on the links and explore the features to see what might be beneficial.  The next few links provide what I think are great activities to get your students thinking about math in new and different ways. At  Which One Doesn’t Belong, classes can get into some amazing math dialogue about which one doesn’t belong.  KenKen puzzles are what I would call the next level of Sudoku, and require students to use number sense and mathematical operations to solve a puzzle. It doesn’t have the strongest math problems, but Free rice does give students the chance to fight hunger while they practice math facts because it donates rice with every correct answer.

This section is dedicated to middle and high school math teachers.  I haven’t recently met a single subject math teacher who didn’t already know about Desmos, but if you’re new to the profession, or you somehow missed it, Desmos provides a free online graphing calculator with many features.  In addition, at Teacher Desmos you can find a myriad of activities to use with students.  You’ll want to get comfortable with Desmos if you’re teaching high school math in SUSD next year because it is embedded in many of the Pearson enVision lessons.  A different website that also has a graphing calculator is Geogebra. This site also has 3-D math features and worksheets.  A third reference for high school teachers is Shodor.  This site provides interactive activities for students in grades 3 through undergraduate level.

More resources for teachers can be found at Illuminations.  This is the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics page, and it contains lesson plans, games, activities, and brain teasers from a very reputable source.  The same organization has another site, Figure This, with games, family practice, and challenges in English and Spanish for the middle grades.  Another source for middle grades is PBS Learning Media.  Here, you can find culturally relevant video logs that are added to regularly.  The website Greg Tang Math is helpful because it offers a variety of resources for both student and teacher learning.  Like many other pages, it has games, worksheets, and student lessons, but unlike others, it also provides teacher professional development and center activities (be aware that some are not free).

Finally, one last resource that I have found to be helpful over the years, is Natural Library of Virtual Manipulatives.  Here, you will find virtual manipulatives for just about every math concept from pre-K through twelfth grade.  The site is clearly organized by math strand and by grade. Unfortunately, there may be issues with Java, depending on which device you are using to access the website.  However, if you are able to use these virtual manipulatives with students, they can be very powerful and are a free alternative to purchasing physical manipulatives for your class.  If you’ve read this far, I hope you came across at least one resource that will support student learning.

Talking Points

Virtual Field Trips

Traditional Field trips are great, but they do have their drawbacks.  Maybe you don’t like the long bus ride. Maybe you have difficulty getting enough chaperones to volunteer or maybe traditional field trips are just too costly.  Virtual field trips are a great way to bring the world to your students without the hassle of a real field trip.

One of the best resources for virtual field trips that I know of is PORTS: Parks Online Resources for Teachers and Students.  PORTS is run by the California State Parks and their rangers.  The park rangers will do a video conference with your class that provides real time, two-way communication.  The ranger can answer students’ questions and present a multimedia, live lesson to the students on a topic related to one of the state parks.  The students can interact with the park ranger as if they were right there, even though they are miles away.

Some of the PORTS topic include:

• Hearst Castle
• Kelp Forests
• Desert Stories (Geology or Fossils)
• Elephant Seals
• Gold Rush
• Monarch Butterfly
• Redwood Ecology
• Salmon Life Cycle
• Tide Pools
• What is a Mammal?

To prepare your class for the video conference, PORTS provides lesson plans, digital videos, digital images, and other media materials on the PORTS website.  All you need is a computer or tablet with a camera, a projector, and a high speed internet connection. PORTS is completely free, high quality, and are constantly adding new topics.  

To get started, go to the PORTS website  and check out the descriptions of the different topic (called Units of Study).  Then fill out the registration form to request a particular topic and date you would like to schedule the video conference.  The ranger or coordinator will get back to you by phone or email. Make your request early in the year, because spots fill up quickly.

Another resource for virtual field trips is the Microsoft Community Skype in the Classroom Virtual Field Trips.  It is also free, is set up similar to PORTS, and uses Skype to do the video conferences.  You do need to set up a username and password to sign in to the site. It has virtual field trips from all over the world.

Lastly California State Parks has partnered with Google to create an experience similar to street view on Google Maps for many state park trails and beaches called Google Trekker.  They did this by mounting a 3D camera to a backpack and walking the trails. This provides a self-guided way to see nature at our state parks without leaving your classroom. Check out all the locations available at this website.  This is also free, but is not interactive with a ranger and is not in real time.

I hope this gives you some ideas of ways you can use technology to bring the world into your classroom and provide an engaging, memorable learning experience for your students.

Improving Literacy with Fluency Tutor

Hi everybody! So, I’ve recently been using a fantastic reading app called Fluency Tutor. The app is meant to take the place of traditional timed fluency tests and running records, both of which are extremely time consuming. The app has several tools/functions that make it a breeze to use. First, it is completely Google compatible. You can import classes from Google Classroom and create Google Classroom assignments from within the Fluency Tutor app. You can also assign to individual students or the whole class, all from with the app. It is also very easy to update your class if you’ve had new students join your Google Classroom.

Fluency Tutor also comes with Fluency Passages that are leveled. You can search passages by lexile level or AR level. This is just my personal opinion, but I’ve found the passages to be of high quality. Many are non-fiction and contain interesting topics like the process in which diamonds are created or how your tongue works. I also really like that some of the early-reader passages don’t look like early-reader passages. But the thing that I really like about this app is the digital tools it contains for students and teachers. Students can record and listen to themselves or even save their recording directly to their Google Drive. They can also have the text read to them and there’s even the option to have it read back in a different language! I’m not sure if every language works for every passage but I’ve seen a HUGE list of languages to select. Students can also click any word in the text and get a definition or a picture definition.

The teacher can create a vocabulary list for all of the words a students has clicked. The list features definitions and is created in a Google Doc. Once passages have been graded, students can see their scores  on a graph- there is a words correct per minute score and a ‘fluency score’ which grades them on phrasing, expression, etc.

For teachers the tools make grading a breeze! Once a student has finished their recording you can listen to it (or any past recordings) while looking at a copy of the text. If you click on any word in the text you can mark it as an error. You can also select the type of error, omission, insertion, substitution, etc. Also, when you click a word to select an error, the recording pauses. After you select the error-type the recording resumes. Awesome! You then mark the last word read in the text and fluency tutor calculates the words correct per minute for you. Once you’ve graded all the recordings for a particular passage you can download a spreadsheet (Google Sheets) with all the scores.

My very favorite tool allows the creation of fluency passages. This can be accomplished by the teacher or the student! Once the Chrome extension is installed a page can be turned into a fluency passage with the click of a button. Now, this doesn’t work with every page and will not work with pdf’s but when it works it is amazing. The resulting page typically looks very clean and pictures that were on the page are often embedded within the passage without errors. For older students, this is really fun and puts them in control of what they are reading. I really love this app because of how easy and useful it is. If you’ve ever hated trying to find time to do 20+ fluency tests then I would highly suggest this app. It does cost 99$ a year, but for me it was totally worth and this will be a tool that stays in my toolbox.

Thoughts From a New Coach

Those who get the best results are the ones who ask the most questions and aren’t afraid to try new things.

In my first year as an instructional coach, I’ve found myself reflecting on my own teaching.  After 15 years in the classroom, it was a scary move to attempt something new. If you had asked me what I thought about this new role earlier in the year, I may not have had such a positive response.  I missed working with “my own” students and I missed the comfort and predictability of my role as a teacher. In the past two months, the Instructional Coaches have been required to attend a substantial amount of training.  The teachers are not unwarranted in their concerns and comments of “I haven’t seen you in so long” or “do you still work here?”

While it bothered me that I was unable to support the teachers I work with as much as I would have liked to, this heavy dose of information rekindled my love of learning.  While sitting through each presentation, I caught myself thinking “I wish I had known that when I was in the classroom” or “that would have helped so much.” There were quite a few moments where we learned the research behind one strategy or another that reinforced some procedure that I had always felt in my gut to be best for students.

Long story short, I wish I could go back and be the coach that I never had.  Of course, I learned to do some things well, but I know so much more now that could make me a better teacher, I almost feel guilty for not providing my students with more than I was able to give them at the time.  I always worked very hard as a teacher, but all I could do for my students was the best I knew how to do.

The harsh reality is that we (as teachers) aren’t getting the job done.  According to the California School Dashboard Website, only 21.2% of our students were College/Career Ready in 2018. (Source: https://www.caschooldashboard.org/reports/39686760000000/2018)

I don’t want to give the wrong impression here.  Teachers are working very hard. Many have more on their plate than ever before and they are doing the absolute best they know how in order to serve their students.  No good teacher, however, will ever tell you that they have no room to improve. I personally believe that 21.2% is not good enough. What we are doing is not working.  My suggestion is to try something new.

So where does technology fit into all of this?  The State of California actually has Standards for Career Ready Practice.  (Source: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ct/sf/documents/ctescrpflyer.pdf)  The fourth of those standards is

Apply technology to enhance productivity.  Career-ready individuals find and maximize the productive value of existing and new technology to accomplish workplace tasks and solve workplace problems. They are flexible and adaptive in acquiring and using new technology. They understand the inherent risks—personal and organizational—of technology applications, and they take actions to prevent or mitigate these risks.

My big takeaway from this standard is that students need to be fluent with the acquisition of new technology skills.  This fluency can only be perfected through exposure and instruction and it needs to begin as early as possible. Just as students learning a new language benefit from being immersed, so do our students who are developing their technological knowledge.

Many teachers are not digital natives.  This is not an excuse that we can accept to justify our lack of instruction with technology.  Our students depend on us to teach and guide them to digital fluency. When I started teaching, I was not an expert at anything.  I’d argue that I’m still not an expert at anything, but my skills are much better developed. I tried new things and I improved. I was fortunate to have others (both adults and students) who helped me improve.  I was able to ask questions and search for answers.

My observations as a new Instructional Coach have shown me that the teachers who are asking the most questions and trying new things are making the most growth (both as professionals and as measured through assessment of students).  Both veteran and brand new teachers are doing amazing things with students that are helping to prepare them for their futures because they aren’t afraid to admit that they don’t know everything and they are willing to ask for help.

Those who’ve worked in Stockton Unified long enough have seen many failures in the past.  If you’ve been considering a new approach, thinking about implementing more technology in your classroom, making drastic changes to the way things are done, or even trying to carry out some small modification to your previous way of doing things that will incorporate technology, I’d like to quote Mark Hall from a recent conversation we had:

“What’s the worst that could happen?”

The Argument for using Google Classroom with Digital Immigrants, Digital Natives

Digital Native? Digital Immigrant? What is that? As teachers, we often tell our students to break down the words we don’t know and to piece together using context clues. Most of us educators will look at the digital and understand that it refers to a technology in some capacity or more likely the computer. But how does being a native or immigrant fit into this picture? Great question! Natives are people who are residents who live in a certain area. Immigrants as we know travel from one place to another. This is also in the very true in the world of technology we live in today. In Marc Prensky’s article “Digital Native, Digital Immigrant”, he discusses the world we live in through the lens of digital literacy and knowledge of technology.

Prensky talks of “digital natives” today as the net generation or digital generation – Kindergartners through college who have grown up with everything digital – Internet, TV, computers, computer applications, digital music players, video games, etc. “Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet” (Prensky, p. 1). Prenksy discusses how technology has infiltrated all aspects of our lives and instead of purposely leaving out technology or having it become a baby sitter, using it to deepen and further learning is essential for students to be prepared for 21st-century learning.

Prensky goes on to discuss who are we that did not grow up with this digital technology? As time has passed, people who have seen technology come into our everyday lives and have seen it take over our daily life are known as digital Immigrants. Prensky says “Those of us who were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives,  become fascinated by and adopted many or most aspects of the new technology“ (Prensky, p. 1-2). Our students feel the same way about technology. The fascination of what the possibilities are boundless when our students enter the cyber world. We as immigrants have to be more understanding that technology is here to stay and to keep our kids engaged and prepared we have to mold and adapt to our students, not for them to mold and adapt to us.

As we move into and through the early parts of the 21st century, it is essential that we as teachers bring technology into the classroom and give our students opportunities for them to use technology the correct way and how it correlates with college and career readiness.

Starting a new school year is the perfect time to implement Google Classroom into your classroom. It allows you to cover the importance of routines and expectations around technology in your classroom and to stress the importance of how to become responsible digital citizens. With that being said, here are five easy ways to implement Google Classroom into your daily teaching assignments and activities to improve your classroom instruction and engagement when starting the new school year.

 

• Posting questions for simple quick writes

 

This is an essential first for the digital immigrant. By posting questions or simple prompts through the question tool, it gives your classroom a chance to open the door to technology and see what amazing opportunities can happen through learning through this media. By posting a simple question or prompt online, students can: practice typing, get familiar with the keys, learn to navigate the computer to go to google classroom, and finally, how to post something that positively contributes to a learning environment.

As students get comfortable posting their answers, you can then allow them to respond to other students in the classroom to promote the sharing of ideas and learning how to give proper feedback to their peers.

This is important because students then feel their work has value and has meaning and purpose. This will take time to practice with norms and expectations, but students do enjoy responding and learning how to engage in discourse on a digital platform. It is a great opportunity to teach them real work life skills on how to communicate with peers in acting in a professional setting. This will transfer to other forms as they grow and mature (or at least we can hope).

 

• Posting math word problems and students explaining thinking

 

This is another great introductory tool for teachers to have students use math with technology. This is also great support around SBAC (hint hint)! Post a general word problem and have students explain their thinking about how they solved it. Start off simple with number sense or easy addition or subtraction problems that students can generally explain with their words. Not only will students feel confident in answering questions, but they will learn how to use proper vocabulary in explaining their thinking. With the shift in math being more explanatory rather wrote notation, it’s important to build in simple activities to show students and have them practice how to explain their thinking, which translates into college and career applications later.

 

• Announcements – links and general news

 

We all get sent links throughout the year to give our students and or parents to take for feedback. Google Classroom is a great way to push these links instead of writing them on the board or trying to type the right link!

To do this, click on the giant plus sign in the lower right corner.

Click on the announcement option, and then you may type your instructions or note for what you want your students to do.

From there, copy the link you need to use and insert into the link option in classroom. By doing so, it will automatically take students to the survey/website/video you need them to go to without worrying about typing the wrong link in the URL bar. Plus, this saves time in making sure all students can get to the right website quickly and effectively. This also helps with instruction if you want students to read online articles or go to a certain website like ST math, Starfall, etc.

These are just a few ways teachers who are digital immigrants can acclimate to the 21st century in the classroom. As always, make technology work for you, not the other way around!

Digital Formative Assessment

Early in my career as an educator, I became a staunch proponent of utilizing technological resources to collect and analyze assessment data.  I’ve spent countless hours collaborating in the creation of digital assessments and providing training in how to use various platforms to evaluate assessments. All of this, ultimately, with the express purpose of giving kids the information needed to improve their learning.  With technology, the feedback could be instantaneous and that’s the beauty of it. My collaborative efforts, however, focused mostly on summative data.

It wasn’t until the past few years that I actually began to explore more tools for formative assessment.  To me, I could always rely on whiteboards, observation, and discussion to elicit data and monitor student progress.  A little circulation around the class to see what students are producing and well planned questions for understanding allow a quick idea of how a class is doing.  I knew that being able to make informed decisions in the moment and providing corrective feedback ongoing throughout the lesson was essential to success, I just wasn’t putting enough consideration in how digital resources could improve efficacy in this aspect of assessment.

As outlined in the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, there are four attributes to Formative Assessment. They occur in a cycle involving clarifying intended learning, eliciting evidence, interpreting evidence, and acting on that evidence.  This process should be fluid and ongoing throughout instruction to enable students and teachers to give and receive actionable feedback to improve learning.

Timely and specific feedback right in the thick of learning is essential to student learning.

So how can teachers use digital resources to implement strategies that may help in this endeavor?  One possible method, I happened to discover while implementing the Netop student application used to monitor our chromebooks.  Besides using the software to communicate with and monitor students in their use of Google applications, it can also be used to engage students and allow them to demonstrate what they know.  For example, during a third grade opinion writing activity we used Netop to allow students to demonstrate their development of a well stated opinion on the classroom projector. Students were eager to have their screens shared on the big screen while they used tools on their chromebook to identify elements of their statement, receive corrective feedback from the class and teacher, and then revise/edit their writing – on the spot. (Editors note: Netop is available to all SUSD classes. For more information contact Mark or Viry in the curriculum dept.)  For fifth grade math, using Google Classroom, DocHub, and Netop; students demonstrated how to create a visual model representing addition of fractions with unlike denominators. All students completed the problem and random screens were selected for display. Students were asked to justify their thinking with partners before presenting their work on the big screen. While observing student work on the Netop monitoring interface, a common error was identified which multiple students made in the process.  Corrective feedback was given immediately to the class before they even completed the problem. The possibilities for formative assessment through the application in conjunction with other resources seems to be limitless.

Another method that can be used for on the spot formative assessment is the use of Plickers.  The application is free and easy to set up. After creating an account online, teachers can choose from a bank of questions, or create their own, for quick checking for understanding.  Student response cards are printed out using the program and teachers download the app on their phones to scan student responses to get immediate feedback. With the implementation of Plickers I have seen classes reach 80% proficiency for a targeted standard within 15-20 minutes after completing multiple problems through the app and receiving feedback.  Finding misconceptions is easy with the collection of the data and having open discussion. With the correct insight brought about in the immediate evaluation of results, students make adjustments and improve. The data also allows teachers to identify specifically which students will need more support or targeted small group intervention after the lesson.

A digital vehicle that some teachers seem to be familiar with that helps to promote collaboration and discussion are back channel platforms.  But those that have experimented with them or use them faithfully may have not considered using them for formative purposes. During lessons, teacher can have a backchannel running, from an application such as Padlet, where students are asked to post questions for clarification.  Some may feel more comfortable addressing some of their learning needs in this format and do not have to wait to address concerns. Teachers can also ask the class to make predictions while modeling a problem or document their metacognitive process while problem solving. Not only can students become more engaged, but the teacher can gain valuable insight as to what they are thinking and clues to their level of understanding.  When posing questions, the teacher may even ask the entire class to post their answers as opposed to randomly calling names for responses. This makes sure everyone has to give input and, again through an application like Netop, display student work for elaboration and feedback.

With all the new innovations and programs now available, the possibilities seem to be limitless.  It’s up to educators to imagine what new and creative ways they can be used to help students be passionate about learning.  I think we need reminders sometimes not to get too wrapped up in one aspect of teaching pedagogy, or in my case one aspect of assessment, and contemplate how various technological resources can serve multiple purposes in the learning environment.  Our willingness to explore these possibilities I believe can make a world of difference in impacting student outcomes.