Personalized Learning

Today, I tried an experiment in my Pure Math 30 class. I gave the students a photocopy of the notes for the day and asked them to read the notes, add to the notes, discuss the notes amongst their group. (I have my students sitting in groups of 4).

Essentially I was having my students learn the material on their own!!!! Man was this awesome!!! The lesson that normally took me 60 minutes to teach was transformed into a self-paced, personalized learning experience for each and every student. It was amazing!!! The students help each other and clarified their understanding by asking me specific questions while I wondered around the room.

After about 20 minutes every single student was working on their assignment for the day. They now had the opportunity to complete their assignment in class, ask each other for assistance and ask me if they were really stuck.

About half way through the class I asked the students how they liked what we were trying today. Here are some of the responses.

"I could learn like this everyday."
"I like this way better"
"I don't learn like this. I need to hear the explanations."

All in all I can't think of why I did not try this a long time ago. I guess fear had a little bit to do with it. Today I jumped in to the deep end of the pool and did not drown. In fact, because I took a risk my students are having a far better learning experience than I have ever provided to them before. I am really glad I took the risk today.

First Exam - Math 10 Common

Myself and my other dept. members (Lara and Emerson) have spent the last few days creating our first unit exam for our Math 10 Common course. Since we are running this course using a standards based grading model we had to come up with a test creation blueprint. Thanks to Lara, our keener, here is the blueprint we used to create our unit exam.

This blueprint is also what we are going to have our students use to self-assess how they performed on each outcome on the exam. The students will then use this self-assessment to help determine which outcome(s) they wish to reassess on.

I did not post the actual exam for fear that my tech savvy students would locate the exam. That would just be bad news.

If you would like to see the exam just drop me a tweet or e-mail and we will make arrangements for this to happen.

Standards Based Grading - Oberservations

So, today I returned the graded quizzes to my Math 10 common students. Some were happy with their "grade" others were not. Then I had them turn to the self-assessment rubric on the back side of their quiz. I gave them a few minutes to rate themselves on how they performed on each outcome. I was amazed at how serious most of the students took the task. Then they had to explain why they gave themselves the rating they chose. Finally, I asked them to write a sentence or 2 about how they were going to try to improve on the outcomes they did not perform well on.

I had them hand this in so I could read what they wrote. Here are some of their comments:

"I need to do my homework."
"I am going to go back, re-read my notes and do some of the questions in our workbook that were not originally assigned."
"I am going to ask my mom if she can find me a tutor."
"Keep doing what I have been doing because I kicked butt on this quiz!!!"

The students pretty much nailed it on the head. Their reflections and observations were pretty much what I would have told them.

This whole exercise took less than 10 minutes. Getting the students to reflect on their performance in relation to the outcomes of the course was well worth it.

I am glad our entire math dept. has decided to try out standards based grading. Our students will be better for it.

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.