Friday, November 6, 2015

What Did I Miss?


This may be it. Every teacher's favorite question. 

Absences are a chronic issue with particular students it has a serious effect on the classroom. Math is so cumulative....everything we do builds on what we've done the day before. I had a student return back to Pre-calculus today after a week out and in that time, here's what we've covered:
  • Right Triangle Trig Review
  • Special Right Triangles
  • Angles in Standard Position
  • Coterminal Angles
  • Reference Angles
  • Radians and Degress
  • Deriving the Coordinates of the Unit Circle from Special Right Triangles
  • Finding Exact Values of Sine/Cosine/Tangent
  • Finding Exact Values of the Reciprocal Functions

Any hope of completing the scavenger hunt we started with as a warm up was futile. She was just too far behind. 

Over the summer, I tested out a theory that I could create a sync-able folder that I could share with students so they could access all of my documents from every class and I wouldn't have to think about uploading them at the end of each day. God bless any of you that do this, but I do not have the presence of mind after a day of chaos to save all changes and upload them to my website (especially for 3 different preps). 

Here's the solution I have tried this semester:



I teach with Notability, so this wasn't a big leap. However, I am sure there are other apps that have an "auto-backup" feature. My documents automatically sync to my Google Drive and I share the folder via a link so anyone can view it. This has solved a lot of problems for absent students, but it's had some benefits I never considered. Many students benefit from being able to go back and re-read the notes (including students who need filled in notes as part of the IEP) that I've seen it as a huge benefit for everyone. And talk about a tremendous resource at finals time, especially since we don't use textbooks at my school. Tech is here to make our lives easier, right? 

No comments:

Post a Comment