Webb of Thoughts

In the past few days I have received some great comments from the students I did my mentorship with Ms. Ionno in ECMP 355.  I’m going to post them below..

• “Thanks for the question Kyle!! isn’t it fun when you can relate math to something you enjoy doing?”
• “hey kyle its m** from ms.ionnos 4th period class just wanted to say hi and how cool these activities are and how much i have learned from the aspecially the academic green one i think u will make a great teacher”
• “Hey Kyle I heard you are leaving us. That sucks, but thanks for everything.”
• “Kyle, It has been a great experience working with you and i have learned so much!
• It makes me sad that you aren’t going to be out mentor anymore! Best wishes for the rest of college!!!!”
• “Hey Kyle, I have had so much fun with this mentoring program and I am glad that the class and I were able to do fun-filled activities with you. Thank you so much for teaching us so much.
• Suprisingly, it is kind of cold in Florida. I went to a lake for camping and it was freezing. I had to sleep in my car because the tent was way too cold. It must be like that all the time in Canada right?
• The activity for the academic green was fun. I didn’t know until that activity that circumfrence and area of a circle could be so difficult! It took a lot of thinking and I had to use all my brain power to get the answer.Although it nearly killed my brain (wink wink!), I had a lot of fun with it.
• I can’t believe the mentoring program is almost over with you. It was so much fun it went by like a bullet! It was so cool acually chatting with someone all the way from Canada. I don’t even want to know how many miles away it is! But it would be a cool fact to learn.
• I just wanted to ask a question and wanted to know if you could answer it when the class gets to see you next week: why did you want to be a teacher? What was your reason to be a teacher? Just wanted to know.
• Well it was a really great experience working with you online. It shows that, maybe, one day, we could acually have classes over the internet like you do but in school. It’s amazing how technology grows and how we use it. I really like technology because then we get to do stuff like this. Communicating in a way people didn’t even think was possible in the 1900s or even farther in the past.
• Thanks again for the great experience! I hope you do good on your final exam! Once again, it was really fun working with you.”
• “I liked the cicumfrance/area activity better than this ratios activity.”
• “KYLE,
• THANKS FOR MENTORING MY CLASS THIS YEAR. I REALLY ENJOYED YOUR HELP. YOU TAUGHT ME HOW TO FIND THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF A CIRCLE AND YOU TAUGHT ME WHAT PI WAS.THAMK YOU VERY MUCH”
• “Kyle it was great working with you. The syombls that each hockey tean had looked very cool. My favorite was the Harford Whalers. Thanks for the time you spent working with us theis few weeks. We hope to do more work with you very soom. I think i speak for the whole class when i say that this has beed a great expiernce and that we hope to keep in contact woth you. Good luck on your exams and all the projects you have dew. DO GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
• ” I really enjoyed having you as a mentor for my class. Your activites were creative and fun! “
• “first this activity was sort of confusing but when i really figured out how to do it it was easyer.”
• “hi kyle this was really fun are these teams and records real? see you next time by”
• “Dear Kyle, I really liked the fact that we get to do real live chats with you and it is so much fun, and I hope we get to do another one soon!”
• ” I think you will like this activity alot because Hockey is one of your favorite sports. In this activity we had to find the ratio of the teams, the winning percentages of the teams, rank the teams from 1st place to 6th place, and find the average of the two 1st place teams and the average of the two last place teams. The teams were the Colorado Rockies, the Quebec Nordiques, the California Golden Seals, the Hartford Whalers, the Kansas City Scouts, and the Winnipeg Jets.”
• “Dear Kyle, Thank you for mentoring ur class. We just finished the results of your retro hockey team activity. I’ve learned a lot.”
• “Thanks kyle it was well not fun but not boring in the middle there some where”
• “It is kind of cool. Like when I play basket ball sometimes I can compare math to that and math becomes fun because it’s involved in something I love.”
• ” Dear kyle,. As you know i am in mrs.ionno’s 4th period class. This was a very fun activity, thank you for spending time with our class to work with us. p.s. GOOD LUCK!!!!!! “

These comments have made my day and have really inspired me as a prospective teacher. I just wanted to share them!

For one of my ECMP mentorships I put together another problem for them to solve.   I put it together for the sixth grade math class in Michigan (you can see their class wiki here).  The class is currently learning about decimals, fractions and percentages.  Mr. Kaechele said he has been trying to explain to the students how the concepts apply to sports.  In a Skype call with him, he told me that he tried to get his students to use the internet to find some sports stats.  He found that this didn’t work as he had planned, and figured it was a little too vague of an assignment.  We came up with the idea to put together a question relating to the sports stats and fractions, decimals and percentages.

I decided to make the problem relating to hockey, mostly because it is my favorite sport and it allows the students to learn something new about me.  I wasn’t able to make a fancy video like I did for my last problem, mostly because I didn’t have the time this week with papers and a midterm piling up.  For this problem, I simply put together a Google Document and posed some questions for the students.   The video is just a screen  recording of the doc (nothing fancy) and me talking about it briefly.

The Google Doc I used can be found here, and is accessible to the students so they don’t have to hear me repeating the questions over and over again (I feel sorry for anyone that would ever have to sit through that).

I wish I would have more time to make a nicer looking video. However, I think the problem will be effective for getting the students to use their new decimal, fractions and percentage skills. I tried to use Dan Meyer‘s recommendation of being less helpful from his comments on my last problem. I think I was less helpful than the last problem and hopefully I can get the students thinking on their own without me guiding them towards the problem. However, I do feel like this could be a problem you find in a text book.

I would love to hear some comments and criticisms on this problem.

So far my mentorships have been going very well.  I’m really enjoying working with all of my mentors and we have been learning alot from one another.

With Mr Kaechele, in Kentwood, Michigan.  I created a math video for his class that went over very well.    You can view it here, and his students’ response here. His class also has blogs, but I’ve honesty struggled trying to keep up with them and comment.  I will be trying to do this more in the next while. I’m not entirely sure what is next for me and this class, but I cannot wait to find out.   Hopefully we can arrange another Skype meeting or I can make another video or problems for his class.

I got overwhelming feedback on the video but I still felt it could  have been better.  I wanted to get the students thinking more outside of the box.  Really, it was just a textbook-type problem put into a video, and I didn’t want it to be a typical math problem.  Then I noticed Dan Meyer had created a post on his blog, dy/dan, regarding my video:Redesigned: Kyle Webb.  He went into some great detail about what I could have done different to make this problem less like a typical textbook problem.  ”The fix is simple but difficult: be less helpful.”  He told our ECMP 355 class this when he presented to us.  His feedback was priceless and something I would have never received had I just presented it to a class.  It’s been awesome having an audience outside of just our class to get some more comments on my work.  So far there have been 366 plays of the video.

Skype with Mr. Poluk

With Mr. Poluk, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.  I have been having Skype meetings with him and his class.  In the last meeting we did a quick Q & A session where we talked about Bitstrips, a comic site they are using, some science, and about podcasts.  His class had created an awesome podcast, which you can view here.  I also told them about my math problem video, and they are going to use it as well.  I told them about my final project about using iPods in the classroom and Mr. Poluk is planning on having his students do some sort of writing assignment about using them in the classroom, which will be great for giving me a student perspective for the project.  I hope we can do another Skype call again this Friday.

Adobe Connect with Ms. Ionno

With Ms. Ionno, in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, I haven’t been doing too much because she has been in the middle of some class restructuring.  However, last weekend we were able to use Adobe Connect and talk one on one for a while and make a plan for what’s coming up.  Last Thursday, I was going to do and Q & A session with her students and their parents, however we encountered some technical sss difficulties and had to reschedule.  You can read more about that here.  We are now meeting on this upcoming Thursday for a Q & A session and I will also do a quick lesson on area and circumferences of circles and present my video for a problem with her students.   I’m a little nervous for it, but at the same time very excited to do it.  It still blows my mind that I’m working with students 4000+ km away from me!

Overall, I’m really happy with how these mentorships have been going.  I just wish I  had more time to dedicate towards them!

One of my mentors, Michael Kaechele,  asked me if I could come up with some sort of problem for his math class.  His math class is currently taking a unit on perimeter, area, and volume.  I wanted to do something a bit more than just a little word problem . I decided to use a video and create a real-life problem, similar to what Dan Meyer does (although nowhere near as good).

I used the University of Regina’s Academic Green as my example and asked how far of a walk it would be to walk around the perimeter of it (assuming it is a perfect circle). I measured in steps, mostly because I didn’t have anything capable of measuring a large distance and partly because I felt it brings a real life aspect to the problem. I then took it further to incorporate an area problem and asked how big of an ice rink could I fit into the green if I wanted to do so.  To close off the video, I ask what is wrong with how I measured for problem, hoping to spark some thoughts that maybe steps isn’t the best or most consistent way to measure.  I also hope they discuss the fact that the green isn’t a perfect circle, and how that could change the problems.

Anyways, this is my final product:

Let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions for any future videos!