Reflection: Representations of Relations

The one thing I am really nervous about when starting this new school year is the bell schedule, 35 minutes for one period. What can I get done in 35 minutes? Can I get a Desmos activity done in 35 minutes? Could we do a class project in 35 minutes? I feel like I will be cutting out important discussions or big "ah-ha" moments with less time.

So I went back to thinking about when I start the second day of class with mathematics, I want there to be context in what the students see and do in math. In my last post about Representations of Relations I received this comment:



They changed the focus of that first lesson to make the rest of the year one cohesive goal.



As part of the curriculum group for Advanced Algebra, we set the pacing guide and decided that representations of relations along with the distributive property should be taught first. One thing I want to get across to students that first week is everyone having their voices heard and problem solving.

So each wall of the classroom will have the same layout from the previous post,

• one wall will have ordered pair along with a piece of butcher paper with notice/wonder at the top. 
• second wall will have a mapping with a different piece of butcher paper with notice/wonder.
• third wall will have a table with butcher paper labeled the same way.
• fourth wall will have the New York Times graph and butcher paper.

I want to have students stand (and gather by the board) and take 1 minute to look and 2 minutes to discuss with a partner what they see. I will ask what students notice first, then wonder. At the end I want them to discuss what was similar or different with the four different relations.

I still have to cover distributive property at the end, but as an exit ticket I want them to reflect on the experience and answer the following question:

Why did the New York Times select a graph to represent this relation?  

I want a connection more to relations, what question should I ask that encompasses what they learned and that representing functions is useful?

#6: Voxer Chat and Buncee

It is becoming more and more difficult to find Things to Try in 2016, since I have already done things like 3D printing in my classroom last year in 2015, I won't make my students do it twice unless I can think of a really cool project.  So this week was suppose to participate in Voxer Chat.

If you haven't heard of Voxer you need to.  It is an amazing tool that allows you to communication with your voice, with text, or with pictures to one or a group of people.  I recently have gotten more involved in BreakOutEDU and designing more puzzles, but the Voxer Chat helps a tremendous amount with getting feedback instantly from a group of knowledgeable people. 

It would be interesting to get something started with a class where students can instantly communicate in your classroom or have wide staff development where they use Voxer instead of getting 25 emails a day from your colleagues. 

       

Second part of this is Buncee.

https://www.edu.buncee.com/

You can create them for your class, I used one for a bell-ringer and it really simple.  You can also have your students create them, we used them for a different lesson and used them as exit tickets.

It is really easy to use this tool with drag and drop directions.  The best part is you can include YouTube videos and make it very simple to flip your lessons if you send it to all of your students.

Here are a few of my bell-ringer examples:

The last one had a YouTube video embeded and makes it easy to push to students and have them watch a quick YouTube video explaining, in this example, square roots and have them coming to class with previous knowledge of what square roots are.

Below I had students create a Buncee for an exit ticket where students had to one for three things they learned about discriminants.

They are quick and easy for students to put together, disregarding downloading time, it took about 5 minutes for students to get use to the tool and send it to me.

Great tool and app for classroom purposes!!