Tests and New Toys

All of my classes survived the tests today, almost all students finishing in the allotted time. They still could not find the period of an object making 60 revolutions in 25 seconds, of course. Part of the problems may be the fact that I don't shy away from letting the answers be fractions, and they're all (especially the lower level students) mortally afraid of fractions and other non-integers. I should probably rewrite the lowest level test to have more integer answers, but given that they freak out if you suggest that they don't have to convert pi into a real number in order to solve problems, I can't possibly make all of the answers on a circular motion test integers.

In more exciting news, I stopped by my IT director's office to get the information I needed in order to get a colleague hooked up with the school's web-portal/parent-pacification system, and walked out with a Student Response System! It was just sitting in the back of her ofice, unloved! Granted, it's not a Senteo, it's a CPS and one that's a version behind current, but still! 32 clickers, the reciever, and the software to run it! Now I just have to figure out if I can jam my current SMARTnotebook files into that system, or if I have to fake it by telling the CPS system that I'm using verbal questions...

Hollywood Squares and other games

Today, I used a Vocabulary Bingo game to review vocabulary-so-far with one of my classes. They were loud and scattered throughout the game, wanted to know if they would get extra credit or candy for winning a round, and took nearly the whole period for two rounds, but most of them wrote down the words they hadn't used on their bingo boards to study for the next time we play, so I'll count that as a success for now.

We used a "Hollywood Squares"-type review game a few weeks ago. The problem with that is the clunky random number generation scheme in SMART notebook. At the moment, I'm using a collection of the Gallery dice to generate page and question numbers so that my brighter lights don't hunt up the old practice sheets I'm using and find the answers before I've finished reading the problems.

I'd like to get to the point of using Jeopardy. The SMARTboard Lesson Podcast has a great version already coded for Notebook, but generating questions for, say, the category "projectile motion" and the answer "42m/s, horizontally" may be beyond most of my students.