Today's Reflection

I will never stop being amazed.  I gave my students a quiz today and afterwards, we went over the quiz using the gosoapbox.com program.  My students were very involved and attentive.  It became a competition among them to get the correct answer, which really helped with active engagement.

I tried out skrbl.com with my geometry class today in an attempt to engage them in an introductory lesson about circles.  I wanted them to research and provide citations for facts about circles to hopefully gain a familiarity with the topic.  They really enjoyed using the site (it is an online whiteboard where users can post information in real-time and share.)  I think that the next time I try an activity like this I will have to be more precise in what I'm wanting.  I will want the students to copy information into their notebooks.  I think this will increase the effectiveness of this activity.  I feel like a whole lot of copy and pasting went on, but not much processing.

My personal learning goal now is to spend time making my lessons more structured and interactive.  I have taken my lesson for this coming Monday and turned it into a Powerpoint that I will use with my SMART Board to try to add a level of structure.  We shall see how this goes!