Laptops Take Over Fact Station

Student uses laptop during fact station

Laptops Transform Fact Station

This year Tabitha’s school purchased a classroom set of laptops for teachers to check out for their students.  We have always talked about how nice it would be to incorporate iPads or more individualized forms of technology at the game or fact stations, but money was the main obstacle.  This purchase caused Tabitha to be able to check out the laptops each day during math workshop.  She incorporated the laptops this week during fact station.  So far, students have used the laptops to play fact games such as Multiplication Grand Prix and other math games that build fact fluency.  To allow students easy access to these teacher-selected links, Tabitha linked the fact sites to her class website.  

Site used for fact practice

As this is still a novel change to the math workshop routine, we look forward to seeing the long-term impacts that this change has on student learning (mastery of basic facts) and engagement.  So far, however, Tabitha has noticed increased student motivation (engagement), resulting in easier management of student behavior during math workshop.  

Assessing Laptop Use Efficacy

So all these anecdotal assumptions about student learning are great, but where’s the proof (i.e. empirical evidence) that this change will lead to student learning?  Enter mobymax.com.   We are anxious to see its usefulness in the classroom.  The idea with having students use this site is that it will allow Tabitha to create student profiles→ students will play math games--> and the system will then track each student’s progress through the fact games-->the site provides Tabitha with data on student growth, and students can also view their progress.  Did we mention that the games are aligned with Common Core!?  Double yeah!  So, the hope is that Tabitha will be able to seamlessly implement this resource, via the laptops, during fact station.  

Student profiles reveal progress

We'll keep you posted! 

T&C

4 Stations!?!

Happy Tuesday! :)

After half of a school year of math workshop, we decided that our students still struggle with basic facts.  Now that we have introduced multiplication and division, we wanted a fourth station for students to practice all four operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. 

So--we spent our last professional work day creating a fourth station: Fact Practice.

After observing a math workshop at another school in the district and brainstorming how best to make this change, we came up with:

We changed our groups to colors: Red=Low, Yellow=Low-Medium, Green=High-Medium, Blue=High. (Groups still change weekly based on pre-assessments, of course) The colored groups make differentiating worksheets much easier. Groups pick the colored sheet or colored game pieces that match their group color.

The bottom part of the board shows how our rotation schedule works.  The dots show where each group starts.  Students rotate in a clockwise circle to the next station around the room.  The low group starts out at the teacher station, while the high group will come to the teacher station last.  The white board space allows for activities to be written in so that each student knows what task to complete.

We came up with the norms together, and the students refer to those norms to self-evaluate at the end of each math workshop.

<--Along with adding a fourth station, we also decided to add a Math Station Sheet (Thank you, to a math coach in our district!).  

This Math Station Sheet cuts down on copies and holds students accountable for the work completed at each station. 

At the start of math workshop, we display the teacher's copy of the sheet on the document camera (ELMO).  We fill in the titles for each station together.  Students also decide on the appropriate voice level for each station and write it in the boxes.

As students go to each station, they record information from that station.  For example, today at Fact Practice, students played Bingo Facts.  As they drew cards out of the basket, they recorded the answers on their Math Station Sheet under the Fact Practice station. 

To encourage us as teachers to always have a closure , we included it on the sheet as well. :)  The closure today in Chloe's class was: "I have 6 vertices, and all of my sides are equal in length.  What am I?" In Tabitha's class, students were told to write two attributes of a hexagon.

For the magic rectangle in the top-left corner, students rate their behavior according to the math workshop norms.  They write a 1-5 (1=many improvements needed, 5=keep it up!).

To keep grading simple, we assign a point for each box on the sheet=10 points (1 for the name!)