Createch-ing

This year the CBE created an Office 365 environment for all the teachers and students. Different applications started to be available during the year: OneDrive, Sway and OneNote amongst others. As a Surface user, I already knew and used OneNote for personal purposes and soon I started to play around with it and discovered a myriad of possibilities for my lessons. I started to use it and soon it became an essential in my class, especially since I do not have a textbook for Mathematics or Spanish. From all the technological tools that I have used in my career, this one has been the most transforming. These are the main 3 reasons why I love it: You can create a Class Notebook for each of your classes. In each class you have, by default, a "Teacher Only Section",  a " Collaboration " section and a "Content" area ( shared with the students in that classroom), and a Notebook for every student. Each student Section has already these sections "Ha

It's been exactly a year since my last post. To say that I have been very busy is an understatement, but I have great news that I need to share with everybody. Our Robotics Team , " Technar " ( team 12055 at FTC Alberta) got the Second Place last weekend in Edmonton in the Alberta-British Columbia competition.  The first place was for a BC team which virtually turns ours as the best team in Alberta. Yay! I couldn't be prouder and happier about this Team that has showed their talent, enthusiasm, commitment and teamwork throughout these months.  We started back in September with a group of 30 grade 8 and 9 students. We have been meeting on a weekly basis ( more than that in the last weeks) guided by Mr Wilson, Engineering and Robotics Teacher from Ernest Manning High School. Mr Wilson has participated in the competition before and has lots of experience so his help has been crucial for our team.  Our team had lots of fun in Edmonton. We had a great start g

If you teach math, this situation will likely be familiar to you. Students need to solve a problem but they refuse to show their work. I am on a mission to get them to solve problems AND show their work without making funny faces like you are giving them bitter syrup. It is being a tough mission, they do good for a couple days, but then they forget...Anyways, as part of the mission I am creating posters like this so that they see it the way I want to see it. I think I am not asking too much but...maybe by the end of the year? I hope so , this mission is turning out to be an odyssey for now. Pssst...it is in Spanish, but you can easily relate.

This week I had planned to participate in the  #hourofcode with the school. I had everything organized but, boom! The Flu came in the way and we ended up doing two days instead of four. Two days were enough though to get a glimpse of the interest amongst students about coding and computer science. It turns out that the opportunities for jobs in computer science is not levelled with the amount of students taking computer science as a Career.  The hour of code is an event that tries to bring this our attention and encourages more presence of computer science in schools. Because, actually, everywhere we go and almost everything we do has a computer software behind. The need is huge and the possibilities are endless.  As a math teacher also, the connections with computer programming are tremendously strong. The designers behind the hour of code also did a great job to present it in a game-like way. For instance, in the Frozen tutorial, our first two math units this year in grade 7 got

Esta mañana he presentado en las jornadas de orientación para los profesores visitantes de Alberta hoy en Telus Science Park, Calgary. Ya no estoy en el programa de PPVV pero continuo trabajando en una ISA y colaborando con Alberta Education de vez en cuando. Animo a los nuevos profesores!