Distance Floor and Desk Activities

Yesterday, all teachers did walk-arounds.  During our planning period, we met as a group and were given two lesson plans for classrooms to visit.  Each group consisted of about 3 teachers and at least one administrator.  Eight teachers volunteered to open their classrooms for observations, including me!
My purpose statement was to "use the floor activity to develop understanding of how to use Pythagorean Theorem to find distances on a coordinate plane".  After my students completed and turned in their bellwork, they joined me at the back of my room where I had taped the axes on the floor.

I used pre-planned coordinates for my students to graph.  Two points created a vertical line, two created a horizontal line and two created a diagonal line.  In the discussion, my students decided they could count spaces for a vertical or horizontal line, but not a diagonal.  Then, I mentioned the Pythagorean Theorem and had them discuss in their groups what they remembered about it.  After their discussions, we created a right triangle and they solved for the diagonal line.  We did a couple other examples.

After that, they went back to their tables and used them to graph their given points and find the distance on paper between the two points.  I taped their two-students tables down the middle before school, so I used that for the x-axis.  The y-axis was the crack where the two tables met.  The day before, I discretely made tick marks with permanent marker and labeled the axes.

I taught 6 classes, with at least 6 groups each and DID NOT TAKE A SINGLE PICTURE!!!!!! UGH!!!! So today, in anticipation for this blog post, I chose a couple examples and staged pics.  I was just so wrapped up in the excitement of my students learning and my fellow teachers observing that I didn't even remember I had my phone in my pocket!

 This is the best year I've had at my current school!  I loved working with some teachers/math coach/literacy coach/admin!  My math coach emailed me, principal texted me and literacy coach put a note in my mailbox!

Google Classroom PD #MTBoSBlaugust

Friday, another teacher and I taught a PD to 36 teachers, many of whom were not interested in what we had to offer.  Let me back up and explain how this came about.

At the end of the school year I had a discussion with my Principal about wanting to use Google Classroom in my class this year.  I was excited to do more research over the summer.  He mentions having a PD on it at some point.  Fast forward to July 24th when I was looking over our back to school pre-planning schedule.  I texted our Math Coach to see if he could move the math PD because two of us math teachers wanted to ATTEND the Google Classroom PD at the same time.  It was about 15 minutes later that he informed me that I was going to be CO-TEACHING the GClassroom PD!

So I set about planning to meet the other teacher to plan.  I had created a class called Staff Development.  He made an agenda (google doc) and an announcement while I created a google form and google sheet.

I discussed with admin that if GClassroom wasn't going to be mandatory, then we needed to offer it to only those interested.  The entire staff was told to attend.  As with any technology, two things happened: they had difficulty signing onto the Chromebooks and many teachers were immediately overwhelmed!  I did learn a couple things though: Chromebooks won't let you sign in if the date is wrong (I still don't know why or how the date was wrong!) and if you want teachers to be students in a class, they must first be a teacher of at least one class (which caused us to have to email our IT people).

I was extremely frustrated as this was my first opportunity to conduct a training at my current school and I felt it was a total flop!  After the overview, we allowed those teachers that were not interested in more information to go work in their rooms.  We were left with about 8 of the interested teachers.  I told a few of my close teacher/friends, including the new math coach, that I thought it was a complete failure.  They all reassured me that it was an awesome training, and that they always expect the technology issues that I had no control over.

The math coach said his wife enjoyed it and learned a lot.  He said I was being hard on myself.  We discussed setting up other opportunities for me to train teachers possibly on their planning periods, but only for those that are interested.  I'm looking forward to doing these smaller trainings.