Exciting Tildee Update

As I'm sure many of you know, it's that time of year again....state assessment time. Review for the state assessment is dreadful. While I want to practice types of past state assessment questions with my students (yawn), the kids (and the teacher) are bored by drill and kill questions. I think it's important that students are comfortable with the type of wording the state uses and the structure of the exam, but review is sometimes unbearable.

To switch it up, I tried having the students make videos of themselves explaining state assessment questions. This was definitely fun for them, but the WiFi at our school is not so great now, so some students had trouble taking the videos and sending the videos to my email. It also got loud in the classroom and some groups were feeling frustrated while trying to tape. It probably wasn't the best environment to try to create a video to teach someone how to solve a math problem. I liked doing it (and so did the kids!), so I'm not going to give up on the idea. I'll have to come up with some adjustments.

After the videos didn't work out so well, I wanted to try Tildee to enhance my review. The first time I tried it with my morning class, it didn't work out so well. I gave each group a state assessment question, told them to log onto the website, take a picture of the question and write out the steps. I explained what a tutorial was and that people all over the world could learn from their step-by-step explanation. They were definitely excited about it, but we ran into some trouble. Again, the students were having trouble because of the school's WiFi. Some students were also having trouble "typing out" the math work and preferred to write it by hand and take pictures. Once they tried to upload multiple pictures, their phones were slowing down and their batteries were dying. For my afternoon class, I decided to take the pictures myself and set their tutorial up for them. I don't think I need to do this every time I want them to use the website, but since it was their first time using Tildee, it was helpful. I also had the groups use my computer and interactive white board to make their tutorials. This enabled them to write on the board and upload their work directly onto the website. Here's what they came up with:

Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5 Part 1 and Part 2
Group 6 

I'm really proud of the work they did. While they didn't get to complete 100 math problems during the period, they worked on all of these questions individually and then checked their work with the tutorials. For each group to explain their question as well as they did on Tildee, I know they learned it well.

I will definitely be using it again. You should try it!  

Shout out to WS for sharing the site :)