Modification to SBG for second semester

I gave a Google survey at the end of first semester, several students mentioned that the 4 point grading scale that I was using seemed a little goofy.  One mistake put you down to a 75 and after the standard had moved to the 5 point maximum, that was a 60.  I started off by using the point system outlined in this blog post by Dan Meyer

Dan Meyer SBG

I thought that the number of standards assigned each quarter would balance that off, but I do still think one small mistake could have too much of an impact on the grade, so I've decided to make each standard worth 9 points instead of 4.  If a student gets 9/9 twice, they receive the full credit of 10/10.  Also, second semester involves some complex tasks, so I'd like to have more points to work with for partial credit.

Twitterfeed

twitterfeed.com is how I connect my Blogger posts with Twitter.  It stopped working, I'm pretty sure that's because I changed my Twitter password recently.  I've tried to reauthorize it, hopefully this post shows up on Twitter...

Problem-Attic

This isn't particularly new, but I just found the part of it that has Common Core questions.  There is a charge for it, but there are nice multiple choice problems arranged by Common Core standard.

http://www.problem-attic.com/

Statistics Unit

We are approaching the end of first semester and we are finishing our first ever Common Core Statistics unit.  We covered dot plots, histograms, measures of central tendency, box and whisker plots and standard deviation.  We found that the students were familiar with most of this information except for standard deviation.  Next year, I will go through some of the basic concepts quicker and I will spend more time on analyzing data.   I'm thinking more analysis of outliers and more study of different types of distributions (normal and otherwise).  Here's links to some activities that I found helpful

Box and Whisker Lesson

Interquartile Range and Outliers

Standard Deviation Lesson

Summary Activity using pennies

Algebra 1 Curriculum Map

Our department put together a curriculum map for Algebra 1 during our Thanksgiving inservice.  This was our first try, it will become more refined at future inservice meetings.  We are doing a Common Core curriculum for the first time this year in Algebra 1, we also started mapping out our Geometry Common Core curriculum during this inservice.

EHS Algebra 1 Curriculum Map by SmithMath

MTBoS Mission #6, what do I do with all this online stuff?

I mostly read blogs. I'm starting to use Twitter more, but it takes a little too much time for me. I use Feedly, it saves all of the potentially interesting blog posts until I get an evening to look through them, that usually happens once a week or so. If I see something I like, I give it a tag in Diigo. The things I REALLY like I put in a mind map. I like MindMeister, it allows me to save ideas in the ways that I see them connecting to each other. You can put notes and links in each node of the map. I use MindMeister to help me develop ideas using the information I find on the internet, here's a screenshot of my Algebra 1 map.

MTBoS Challenge 3, One Good Thing

I've been working hard putting all my class materials on my web page this year and I don't really know if people are using them yet. Today I handed a packet of papers to a student who missed last class and he said he didn't need it, he'd already printed it out from the website and he understood what we'd done. Yay for systems that work!