Standards Based Grading Begins

Last week was our first week with students at Cold Lake HS. Our entire math department has decided we are going to start to make the transition to standards based grading. We started our journey last school year by meeting with assessment specialist Deana Senn. She did an awesome job of helping us to understand Assessment for Learning and Assessment of Learning. We then took the next leap and began looking at the outcomes in our NEW Math 10 Common curriculum. This curriculum is new starting Sept.2010.

We spent approximately 4 months rewriting the curriculum outcomes in student friendly language. The result of our work is this document.

We have broken these outcomes down into units and during each unit we will be exposing our students to the outcomes for that unit. Here is what we gave our students for unit 1 on Radicals and Exponents.

After one week I am preparing to give my first assessment to my students. It is a quiz but has a twist. After the students write the quiz and I grade it the students have a self-assessment rubric to complete. Thanks to Deana Senn for helping me polish up the rubric. The purpose of this rubric is to help the students identify where their weaknesses are and what they need to continue working on. I did not come up with this rubric on my own. I "borrowed" it from Matt Towsley's materials from his summer course on Formative Assessment and Standards Based Grading.

Stay tuned and follow myself and my dept. on our standards based grading journey. Feel free to provide us with some feedback and guidance. We welcome it!!!

Refections from ISTE 2010

It has been approximately 2 weeks since I returned from ISTE 2010 in Denver, Colorado. I find that ISTE is the best conference I attend because of all of the conversations that occur outside of the sessions. It is a conference where you can sit down and talk with some of the gurus of educational technology. People like, Jeff Utecht, Will Richardson, David Warlick and Dean Shareski. These people are in fact educators like you and me. They LOVE to have you walk up, introduce yourself and engage in a conversation with them.

Part of the benefit of ISTE is making connections with colleagues from around the world and sharing your thoughts, ideas and theories. I know many people have never attended ISTE or may never get the chance (if you get the chance you HAVE to go). So, this blog post is about sharing with my PLN. Those of you that read my blog.

I attended ISTE with Jared Nichol, a colleague of mine from Cold Lake HS. Jared and I share many of the same views on technology in education even though we teach different subjects. I teach mathematics and Jared teacher English and Multimedia.

Jared and I had the privilege of attending not only ISTE but TedXDenverEdu. It just so happens that this TED event was happening in Denver at the same time as ISTE. The entire event was focused on education. While many of the keynote speeches were excellent this one stood out. It is delivered by Keith R. Krueger who is CEO of the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a national nonprofit organization that serves as the voice of K-12 technology leaders, especially school district CTO's, who use technology strategically to improve teaching and learning. Keith not only talks about the problems we are having in education but also offers solutions to these problems that will not cost a huge amount of money.



While Jared and I attended great sessions throughout the entire ISTE conference there are always a couple that stick out as "really good"!!

The final keynote presentation by Jeff Piontek ,who is the Head of School for the Hawaii Technology Academy, was a great way to end the conference. We left this keynote presentation with that "feel good" feeling in the pit of our stomach.
Make sure you fast forward this video to 16 minutes. That is where Jeff's keynote talk begins.



Well, I know I have only shared a couple of sessions from my ISTE experience. I hope these two videos go a little ways towards inspiring you for the upcoming school year. I know I am pumped!!!

I have been thinking....

Summer vacation is a great time to sit back and reflect. All of those ideas that have been bouncing around in my head can now be given some more serious thought.

One of the things I have wanted to do since attending NECC 2009 in Washington D.C. is to organize an EdubloggerCon event right here in my hometown of Cold Lake, Alberta. I really like the format of EdubloggerCon. You get a bunch of educators together, they decide what topics they would like to discuss, you set up an online schedule on a wiki and the attendees decide which topics they would like to participate in. The key word here is "participate". There are no "speakers" at the sessions.
Everyone gets together and discusses the topic for that session. It represents the collective sharing of knowledge amongst each other. We share our successes and failures, we help solve each others problems and the best thing of all, we develop connections amongst colleagues we may have never known before. This is truly powerful.

So, I guess my first goal for next school year is to organize EdubloggerCon Cold Lake. Stay tuned to find out how it works out.

If you have any experience or ideas for our event please leave a comment!!!

Assessment for Learning

I have been trying some different Assessment for Learning(AFL) strategies in my high school Mathematics classes this semester. Yesterday, I gave a vectors assignment to my Applied Math 30 class. I had them complete the assignment in class but after each question come to my desk and have me check over their work and their solution.

It worked great!!! I was able to see how each student was progressing, I was able to reteach or assist the students with difficulties or misunderstandings. In the past, I gave out the assignment, had the students complete the assignment and them took it in for grading. The OLD way let me see what students knew and did not know but did not allow me to help them out in any way.

The problem I have is that in the past I would have had a mark to place in my markbook. Even though I did "mark" every students assignment as they did it I do not have anything recorded for this assignment. I realize that it is assessment for learning so the students are still 'learning" the material but I should document some how the progress of each student on this assignment.

Do I use a rubric? Do I use a checklist? Not sure how I can document my students progress. Any suggestions are welcome.

Sometimes You Know You are Doing the Right Thing

In all of my classes we are currently having our students prepare for their final exams that begin in about 5 days. In my Applied Math 20 class I had two students request to borrow a laptop out of the cart to study for their final. I was curious what they were going to use the laptop for.



So, I said "Why do you want to borrow a laptop?"

Their response was, "I have lost some of my notes and my binder is really disorganized. I want to use the laptop to go to the class wiki and look at the notes you have posted. They are really organized well and I will be able to more easily study the material for the final exam."

I immediately got each of them a laptop.

Inside of me I had the biggest smile!!!! These two students made my day. They "get" why we have a class wiki and they were going to use it to help themselves out. Hopefully, the other students around them see how these two students are using the class wiki and make use of everything I have posted on it.

If you can check out the class wiki here.

These two students are living proof of why I use class wikis. It is because it "helps" students. Sometimes you just know you are doing the right thing.

How My Daughters Learn and Work

This past Christmas we decided to get our two daughters a Macbook Pro as a gift. My daughters are definitely digital natives. They both have an iPod Touch that they use everywhere and they were continually borrowing mine or my wife's Macbook Pro.



So, a couple of days ago my youngest daughter, Sarah, said, "Dad, can I take my Macbook Pro to school to use in class?"

My first question was, "Don't you have carts of Macbooks at school that you can use?".

Her response was, "Yes, we have carts of Macbooks but our teachers NEVER let us use them!!"

I discussed this with her a little. She informed me that most of the teachers are either scared of using the Macbooks with their students or just do not want to bother. Interesting!!

I told my daughter that I would have to check with the Director of Technology (a good friend of mine) and her principal before I allowed her to take her Macbook Pro to school. I am all for letting her take her Macbook Pro to school as that is a TOOL she uses to learn and work. Why would I not let her use it at school!!!!

I did not want to step on any toes by just letting her take her Macbook to school.

I e-mailed the Director of Technology to see if he was OK with having my daughter bring her Macbook to school. He e-mailed me back and informed me that they are just adjusting the network at school to allow student owned devices on it. He asked me to wait a few weeks. Once things are functioning he will get back to me and things are a go.

Nice to see my daughters school district is preparing to let student owned devices be used at school.

I am very glad to see that my daughter is asking to use the tools she is most comfortable with to assist her in her learning. This skill of advocating for herself is going to be very useful in later life.

Conics Around Our School

We have just finished studying Conic Sections in Pure Math 30. At the start of the unit I informed my Gr.12 students that, for 1 bonus mark on their unit exam, they needed to use their cellphone or digital camera to take a picture of a real life example of a conic section. Many of the students took me up on this challenge, but I was kind of disappointed. The vast majority of the students brought me a picture of a circular object. While this an example of a conic section, I was hoping for ellipses, hyperbolas and parabolas.

So, on Thursday I decided to put the student to work and actually have them find examples of every conic section. At the start of Thursday's class I told my students we were going on a scavenger hunt. This got their attention!!! I informed them that they needed to use their cellphone to collect pictures of objects around the school. They needed to find a real life example of a circle, an ellipse, a parabola and a hyperbola. Immediately one student said, " Can we half a half an hour to do this?". I informed them they had 10 minutes to collect their pictures. So, off they went. They were like little kids in a candy shop. They were so excited!!!

In under 5 minutes, every student,(there were 20 of them) had collected their real life examples. It was really amazing to see how quickly they could find real life examples of conic sections around the school. I then asked the students to e-mail me their pictures from their cellphones. Here are some of the pictures my students sent me.







My students even explained to me that they took these 2 pictures above because they were examples of degenerate hyperbolas. Cool!!!










This little extension of Conic Sections was definitely worth the 10 minutes of class time that it took!!

Try sending your students on a scavenger hunt with their cellphone. You will be really pleased with what they find.