It's Spring. It's the time of year that our minds are on the beach and sleeping in just as much as our students minds are on video games and playing outside all day long. No matter how cool this Promethean is, it's hard to compete with the sun shining through the windows beckoning students attention. I'm trying hard to keep things interactive and entice students to participate in what we're doing up front. I've been reminding myself of all the tools available to change up activities that are seemingly the same. For an EOG math game today I used the spotlight tool. The kids were just answering EOG questions again, but this time, they couldn't wait to see what question the spotlight would reveal next. I've, of course, had students coming to the board to annotate, highlight, underline, and answer reading questions. We've loved "fit to width" option and are able to write our thinking and underline answers and then save our annotations to revisit another day. This has been very helpful and the students even "oohed" when I showed them what I had learned. I'm also trying to use different reveal strategies, such as erasing annotations over typed text to reveal an answer or moving a whole text box to reveal others. A strategy I used recently in a science flipchart was having students "trash" items that didn't belong by dragging them to the trash bin. I might even use this strategy to "trash" answers that don't belong with our EOG questions. At this point I'm using every strategy I can think of to keep student attention.
What is everyone else doing?
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