Blog Post #7: Leading a Learning Activity

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Hello everyone!

I am here to update you all on how my leading a learning activity went, and what I learned from it!

Last week, I led a grade 10 Applied/Academic Trigonometry activity, while focusing on Similar Triangles. When I chose my curriculum expectation, I was pretty excited because I was supposed to focus on the application problems involving similar triangles. I thought about what I wanted to use as an application problem, and I thought that using shadows would be great to find missing measurements. I ended up creating 2 problems, the first was a visual problem, where I created an image with measurements.

You can see the problem below:

1. Using similar triangles, solve for the height of the Brock Schmon Tower.


For this problem, I used geogebra and I messed around with the site so that everyone could work together on the site to solve the problems, but I was unable to figure it out. While creating this image, I lost my work twice, so it took me a while to create the image and became very frustrated with the software.

The second problem that I asked the class to complete was a written problem, here it is below:





This problem was a lot more straightforward, but I wanted to find a program that everyone could use together. I ended up finding a site called Whiteboard.fi, where you can create a whiteboard, and your students can edit their whiteboards with teacher supervision. I thought this site was very cool, however, I did find a few downfalls to this site that I would like everyone to know about:

1. This site is free, but if you want your whiteboards to save, you have to pay for the full version. I learned the hard way, as I created the whiteboard a few days before the class, then when I tried to open the whiteboard on the Monday, it was gone. I had to recreate the whiteboards, which was very inconvenient when I had spent hours doing this earlier on. After reading some reviews of the site, someone said that if the whiteboard is left inactive for 2 hours, your whiteboard disappears. This is very frustrating as a teacher because this doesn't allow you to prep for your class in advance. If I end up teaching online, I would consider purchasing the full version, as it is very handy to use.

2. Another issue I had with Whiteboard.fi was when new students would join the whiteboard, I would have to set their background as my whiteboard. There was not an option (that I was aware of), that would lock my whiteboard as the background for any student that would join. This doesn't sound like an issue, but it can be. If your students begin drawing on their whiteboards and solving the problems, you cannot set the background for another student, without erasing everyone's work. I wish there was a setting that would automatically set everyone's backgrounds, that way you don't have to worry about losing your students' work.

Anyways, I found that my leading a learning activity went well. Everyone participated and it seemed as though everyone understood the concepts. Overall, I would use whiteboard.fi again in a math lesson, as it's great to see and monitor everyone's work, but I would like to explore the site more to see if it's possible to set the background without erasing students' work.

- Jenna



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