Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Students have been assigned tier

Students were assigned a tier yesterday based on their pre-assessment and an assignment completed prior to Thanksgiving break. They will be accessing the blog site for their assignment during this week and early next week. I am eager to see how well this works and to see if each student uses the correct tier. I thought about 3 separate blog sites for the 3 separate tiers but opted for just the one site. It will probably be much easier to manage in the end with just one site for both the students and myself. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Blog assignment site address

I forgot to mention the address for the blog that I am using for the students.

Here it is:

http://mrnelsonprealgebra.blogspot.com/

Monday, November 22, 2010

I created the tiered lesson for my final project over the weekend. I decided on the subject of two-step equations for my pre-algebra class. This seems to be an area where they tend to need a little extra help every year. I created a blog with the lesson listed on the site. Students are to visit the blog site, choose a tier based on their individual readiness, complete the lesson as indicated, and finally will have a post-assessment based on the tier that they choose. I plan to have the students visit the site and choose their tier after Thanksgiving break. They will have between 2 and 4 days to complete the task, dependent upon computer access that week. I'm looking forward to seeing how this works!

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Students took a pre-assessment yesterday and I plan to use that data as one of the driving forces for tiering my lesson for different levels of readiness. I'm still tinkering with the actual format and think I plan to create a blog where I can post links to the various levels. I'm thinking that if I do this correctly that I can use it in coming years as well and possibly share with colleagues that teach the same subject.

Thursday, November 11, 2010

I've decided to create a lesson utilizing a few Web 2.0 tools. I decided to try to use a twitter account that I already utilize for class, some students already have a working knowledge of it. I am going to create a blog page for the differentiated lesson. I plan to tier the lesson for 3 levels of readiness, I will let students formative assessment data guide their grouping. I'm eager to give this a shot, I've fiddled with blogs in the past but never put much time and effort into actually seeing how well I can utilize it as a teaching device.