Musings from Mrs. Galvan

"Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals."

Do I need to shuffle and spiral my homework assignments?  An interleaved assignment mixes up different kinds of situations or problems to be practiced, instead of grouping them by type. When students can’t tell in advance what kind of knowledge or problem-solving strategy will be required to answer a question, their brains have to work harder to come up with the solution, and the result is that students learn the material more thoroughly.

I am loving digital portfolios! This week my Algebra 1 students are publishing their results from their stock projects. They were told to choose four different stocks and to track their values over the course of two weeks. They recorded the values in matrices. Here is a sample of how their summaries turned out:

I am sure there exists better videos on how to do this out in the world, but I made my own. I wanted to show one way for students to format equations for their digital portfolios and since google drive has an equation editor built in, it'll work!

We need sleep! Another article on the importance of sleep for adequate brain function. I like this quote below and hope my students take it to heart. So what happens if you don't sleep? "A whole constellation of different brain and body functions start to deteriorate," he says. Our brains are less effective at absorbing new information without sleep. Plus, our ability to retain recently learned information is impaired, and "you lose the chance to essentially hit the save button on that information."

I have been teaching for 12 years now and I still experience a small sigh of relief when students actually do the assignments... This year I added digital math portfolios to my list of goals for students and they are coming in! *sigh of relief* 1. First assignment: Just create the blog with title and description.   I like her witty title and LOVE the background. 2. Prompt #1 (I felt like an English teacher). I casually put this prompt on the HUB (our school's name for Canvas). I told students about the prompt being on the HUB in class, but many did the assignment BEFORE I told them about it! Example for Algebra 1. 3. Collect the Blog URLs via Assignment Drop Box Google Form. Thank you Will Kimbley for showing me how!  I embedded my form on the HUB. The google form generates a nice spreadsheet from which you can click through your students' portfolios. I made a template, which hopefully, you can use here . You will have to be a ...