We are decidedly not that school with the chrome books and the ipads and the smart boards and all the digital tools.
We’re luckier than many with a pretty-functional computer lab, and a teachers’ desktop/projector set up in the class, and I am grateful for every move I’ve made to digitize my prep.
But, there’s a clunky log in/password system system and students of varying digital literacy and all the inertia to fight to move to the lab. So, mostly math class is a pencil and paper kind of operation for my students, with lots of google docs and TEDEd’s for me.
But the technology they all have is, of course, the phones.
Sometimes a distraction.
Often a necessity, for a room full of parents with patchy childcare arrangements.
My latest recruit in the campaign to make math happen at home.
This fall I declared “App Day” in each of my classes (well, I declared it in my head, anyways)
4 pm – Send Remind group text, “bring your phone and save this link”
We already use Remind for announcements and absences, my goal is to nudge people into doing math between classes by sending out resources/practice problems/math encouragement . I’m, counting on the ‘schedule’ feature, so I can pick the resources while class is fresh in my mind, and set it up to send later in the week.
(yada, yada, yada; class starts, human interactions and pencil and paper work…)
6 pm – Mass downloading of Quizlet. (wifi, slighly overwhelmed)
Quizlet motivation: I’m tired of smart, hard working students getting problems wrong because they mix up ‘mean’ and ‘median’, even though they know how to do both. But also, it takes approximately no time to study a set of flashcards, and you don’t even need pen/paper/calculator, so this is the lowest barrier to entry math studying I can think of.
(yada, yada, yada; learning, talking, writing, non-tech interactions)
7 pm – Practice Options: Paper or Kahn
Like Quizlet, my motivation is largely about lowering the barriers to math entry. If it’s on your phone, that you’re scrolling through while you’re in the doctor’s office/school parking lot/random down time anyways, it’s a lot easier to study than the notebook in the school bag. Last year I said something like “there’s this app, go try it” with unsurprisingly tepid results, this year, I’m making a point to use it in class. On App Day, I said “start at X and see how far you can get” Other days “watch video Y” shows up on a challenge card
Since then…
Some students use and like Quizlet, some love Kahn. I’ve shoehorned both into class.
Remind makes communicating vastly easier. My math sending is sporadic, but it felt great to schedule a message on a cancelled class night “Missing math? Try this…”
I’m looking at the start of a new trimester, and planning App Day, Part 2 for the new students joining us.
