Ferryway 2.0

I usually don’t accept any talking or getting out of line while walking in the hallway, however when my class sees Mr. Simpson, they can’t control themselves.

Is he coming to our room?

Is it time to do Qwizdom again?

Please, please, can we use it today!!

The look on my students’ faces when we see Mr. Simpson is priceless.  They smile ear-to-ear and have a look of excitement and hope that they will be the students participating in Qwizdom.

Our most recent Qwizdom experience was a great success.  In my first experience with Qwizdom, I tackled a Literacy lesson.  This last time, I took on what I thought would be a more difficult task with Qwizdom: MCAS Math Prep.  After creating the Qwizdom presentation and using it with my class, I realized that Qwizdom was a wonderful tool to use to better my instruction in math.

Prior to implementing the lesson, I was concerned about how students would show their work, which was something I had stressed over and over again through the course of the year.  The students were able to easily write down their answers on a piece of graph paper and then select their answer on their remote.

Now, that all the third grade classes have been able to experience using Qwizdom, we, as a team, have been able to take a look at how each class has performed on the same lesson.  The other teachers and I used the Graph Slides to better plan our upcoming Math review to help prepare students for the May MCAS exam.

We found a multi-step question involving fractions to be extremely difficult.  The students had to find one-third of 12 and then subtract what they found from the total of 12.  They also had to be able to figure out that the person in the story gave away one-third, meaning they kept two-thirds for themselves.  The wording of the question required lots of pre-thinking in order to figure out where to go with the problem.  It required students to find a fractional part of a whole number.  The students also had to be able to realize that if you were giving away one-third, you must be left with two-thirds.  This is definitely a difficult problem to solve, but one the students must be able to complete on the state math exam.

It was clearly displayed through the “Graph Slides” that the students struggled with this problem.  There was no one wrong answer that a majority of students across all third grade classes seemed to choose.  This let us know what we needed to cover was how to approach the solving of this problem from the very first step.  I saw my students struggling while trying to solve it, so I put some images and number sentences on the board while trying to talk through getting the problem started aloud.  I think that this helped some students in my classroom who were completely stuck on where to go.  Another teacher let her students work through the problem the best they could and then had a group discussion of strategies after they entered their answers.   This led to great discussion of the different problem solving strategies that students could use to find the answers.  It also allows us, as teachers, to see that many students need review on multi-step word problems and using fractions.

Personally, I found the Answer Slides to be an extremely helpful teaching tool.  It allowed me to highlight numbers and vocabulary from the questions to show the students what they should be looking for in the questions.  It also allowed me to place number sentences on the slides to show how to solve the questions.  On some answer slides, I was able to pose questions to help those students that were confused or answered incorrectly to start asking themselves the right questions to get to the correct answer.

The morning after the Math lesson, I asked students to write down what they thought of the Qwizdom experience.  Here are some of their responses:

I think that using Qwizdom for lessons is a good way to get better and better at subjects because you won’t need to pass out work, do the work, and pass in the work.  You just need to pass out the remotes, get it ready, and start.

I liked Qwizdom because it’s easy and I like seeing if I got it right or wrong right away!

I love, love, love Qwizdom!

I would like to do it again!