It’s All About Math: Tellagami, Kahoot.it, iMovie and Pictionary

This week in Calculus the task was to break down those barriers that students have when we are talking about limits.  This is really hard, so on Tuesday we started class off with a Kahoo.it quiz (go ahead and take the quiz, see the feedback and think of the possibilities) over the limits we had been struggling with last week.  Wow – the kids really go into it!  The groans when they were wrong, the cheers when they were right.  It reminded me of the old HBO commercial:

The Kahoot gives immediate feedback, so on the questions that the students really struggled with, I worked them out.  The questions that the students nailed, we just moved right on.  It was a great way to start out the class period.  I moved from talking about the problems to giving each group of students an iPad preloaded with Tellagami and iMovie.

Each group of students was given the task of solving a limit problem of their own choice and creating a Tellagami of their solution.  With Tellagami, you have 30 seconds of narration (in the free version), so we had to talk about making more than one if necessary.  Completed Tellagami’s were then saved on the iPad in the Camera Roll and used as the video in iMovie.  The students could make a few minor edits and were then ready to share with the world.

Some of those videos are great, some left a little to be desired from the instructional side, but the important thing for me is this: the kids solved a difficult problem, created a fun teaching video, and put it out there for everyone to see.  Here are a few of examples:

In the process of putting these video on YouTube, the students were also able to rack up a few credits to spend in our classroom market as part of the gamification of my classroom.

On the PreAP Precalculus side of things, we did a really fun activity with describing graphs to a partner, think Pictionary.  One of the main points of emphasis in this course is analyzing a graph for several different features: increasing/decreasing behavior, continuity, asymptotes (horizontal and vertical), domain, range, maximum and minimum values, and upper/lower bounds.

With this activity we (this is Kristina’s brainchild) cut out several different types of graphs that students would have to describe to their partner and only had one minute to do it. Students were in groups of four and those were in pairs.  One pair would try and explain/draw (the pictionary part) the graph.  The other pair would determine if the drawn out graph was a close enough representation of the original.  One point if the graph was good, no points if it wasn’t.  NO CHEATING – put up a barrier between students 🙂

Describe this graph to your partner. No hand gestures! #oklaed #okmath #memprecalc pic.twitter.com/AyGxoCUq9v

— ᗡʜꟼ | boowlɘꙅɒH ƚƚoɔꙄ (@TeachFromHere) September 4, 2014

The students really go into this one also – again, the possibilities are limitless as we start investigating graphs and analyzing everything that we see.  There as also some heated debate about exactly how close was good enough…

One of my personal goals for this school year is to post to social media several times each week.  I want the world to see what we are working on and see our successes and failures.  I want to share my classroom with people I have never met, to trade ideas and continue to grow as an educator.  To celebrate what works and get input/ideas to improve what did not.  Thanks for reading!