Day 1!

Day 1

I have decided to abandon Siri as my method of blog-writing. He and I (I changed the voice to a man) don't seem to understand each other very well...

Day 1 was actually last Friday, but I decided to write about it today.. busy weekend!

Day 1 was awesome!

The Grade 11s
I had my 3Us go through a GSP investigation that I put together using a GSP file I made in SketchPad Explorer and a handout.
Students accessed the GSP file from their google drives seamlessly and with ease! Solutions can be found here.
I think they enjoyed it, and the novelty of the iPads certainly didn't hurt.
It definitely required a little bit of guidance, but that was to be expected.


The Grade 9s
I also had my 1Ds use a GSP file I created to explore linear systems. They had a handout that they worked through where they manipulated the slope and y-intercept of their lines using sliders, wrote equations, found POIs and checked solutions using the L.S. R.S. method.
The assignment was kicked up a notch when students were told to make their lines intersect at a specified point. They then had to work with lines with slope of 0 and finally had to activiate a 3rd line and ensure all three lines met at one point.
My favourite part of the whole exercise was the freedom to develop "on the fly" bonus tasks for students who finished the assigned work early: "Make two lines perpendicular and have them all intersect at one point" or "Have all three lines intersect at (5, 2) and ensure two of them have positive slope" etc...

It was fun!!!

And at the end of the class a few students asked if they could finish it up at home. I said that they, unfortunately, couldn't take the iPads home and they replied that they could do it on their own device! And they did... they downloaded the SketchPad Explorer app, logged into their Google drives and opened the file. Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

-Dave

P.S. Check out this photo of something I've come up with to increase accountability and responsibility. I got 5 different colours of cases and have assigned each numbered iPad to a student or pair of students (depending on class size). iPads were assigned in increasing order of lates/absences.
The colours will also allow for easy group manipulation: pinks get together or pink-purple, orange-red etc...