MTBoS Directory & Post-it Plus App

Hi everyone!

I just want to give a quick list of 3 awesome things:

1. MTBoS Directory!
Wow this is going to be amazing - one comprehensive list for our little math world!
Go to http://sites.google.com/site/mtbosdirectory to sign up! Click add entry, and let us know who you are. I've been having some fun today looking up teachers in my area, and finding some amazing new blogs to follow.


2. Post-it Plus App
This is random, but I read a blog post today that just ROCKED MY WORLD. I do so many sorting, matching, and ordering activities, and I've finally found a way to digitize this process. Check out the idea from Teaching High School Math here. I tried it out very briefly while my students were working on the warmup, and I'm already planning to use it tomorrow for students to practice switching between log and exponential form.


3. ScoodleJam and Nearpod App-Smash
Is it still called an App Smash if it's only smashed by the teacher? Hmm....I'll have to think about that.
ScoodleJam is a great doodling app - I downloaded it last week when it was free, and have been using it to create some cool activities. It's easy to save an image created in ScoodleJam, and I imported them into Nearpod to create some introduction puzzles based on this blog post. I used it at the beginning of my lesson for solving exponential equations without logs. You can check out the Nearpod presentation I used here. It's not too fancy, but it really made this lesson so much easier on my students, and it only took me about 10 minutes to create!

Exponents ISN Pages

For our introduction to exponents, here are some of the pages we worked on, with some student samples. I got this idea from talking to another teacher over summer that said she always did one day just talking about squares, rather than exponents. She said she had students draw squares with different areas, and talk about their dimensions. I turned it into an exponent tower, but I'm sure it's been done before somewhere. 

Once we were done with squares, we started talking about other exponents. I found this free worksheet, and I loved how it broke it down for them. (As a side note, yes, I teach high school. And YES, this is a middle school topic. But, YES, they are this far behind, and need this basic of a review.)

We explored patterns...

And then practiced over and over and over.