Bright Ideas Blog Hop - Integrating Technology & Math

I am really excited about what I am going to share with you today! Last year, I indicated that one of my professional goals for the current year would be to involve students in their own learning and understanding their own data. I wanted my students to understand their progress and feel proud of their growth. I wanted for them to see the correlation between working hard and results. 

However, I didn't find this to be an easy task and I wasn't 100% sure what to do with it! I started the year by putting a clip chart up in my classroom and I used clothespins for each student. The clothespins will show how each student is progressing toward mastery and it'll be fun to watch everyone move. I have a very competitive class and it'll be interesting to see how they compete with one another to move up the chart in mastery.

The second phase came when my grade level team and I were discussing ways to get students to graph their progress on reading fluency and my grade-level team member mentioned that she had her students graph their growth in their math computational fluency last year. I had thought of doing this this year by giving each student a chart and making paper graphs. It's kind of annoying to use paper graphs and not lose them while you're passing them out and collecting them again repeatedly.

Then...my team member provided me with this astonishing idea...the students could create a graph in Google sheets for their data and share it with the teacher. I've done this in my class and I now have a folder in my Drive with an individual graph for every single student in my class!! This is such an awesome idea to integrate technology, computer skills, and math! I absolutely love this idea! Plus, it makes it easy to show data on each student by simply printing out their progress chart. No more searching through work samples for meetings, losing stuff, filing hundreds of pages, etc. They're all here!

Here's what it looks like.....

I plugged in some future scores so you can see what it would look like once we have data in!

All we did was create a table on the left on the Google Sheet with a space for each month. Then, we inserted a line graph with values for the scores. Once the graph was popped in, the chart was ready to go! Now, the students can keep track of their progress and it's easy to share with parents as well!

What do you think of this math and technology integration idea? Would you use it? What have you tried in the past that has helped students monitor their own learning?

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