Monday – the day after the weekend and before a visit to TCEA13 in Austin – what’s an algebra teacher to do? Why not something QR-operative? (think cooperative, but using QR-codes… I so easily amuse myself…) On Friday, I felt like I did WAY too much talking during instruction, and students needed a day to talk to one another.
I examined my list of learning targets for this unit on factoring polynomials, and made 6 Keynote slides – a slide to address each one. After saving the Keynote as a PDF and splitting it into two parts, I housed each of the two PDFs on a “hidden” page in my Weebly teacher website, created QR codes linking to each of the documents, whipped up a template for student work, and gave them lots of opportunity for math conversation today. It was exactly what they needed – what a joy to witness “A-Ha!” moments!
If you’d like to see the file, here’s a link to the resource. The QR codes are right there on the template, which made it easy for students to access the problems in the first place, and will make it easy to revisit the problems on their iPads after receiving their papers back with my comments added. (Better than my earlier attempts at taping QR codes on classroom walls – while it’s great to have students walking around, I felt like QR codes on the work template made the activity more cohesive!)
Here are a few classroom pics – you can almost hear the meaty math talk just by looking at them!
