Digital Exit Tickets

Get some of my Exit Tickets and other FREE stuff here.

(If you want to skip to the bit where I get specific about Digital Exit Tickets, scroll down to where it says, "Getting more feedback from the students".)

There's a pandemic. 

It's a coronavirus. Highly contagious. The pandemic affects everyone. EVERYONE. Around the world. This is unprecedented. If ever there is a reason to use the word "unprecedented," this is it.

There is a Shelter in Place order by the governor. Medical experts are recommending that if we go outside, then we should wear a mask.

My school has been closed to the students since mid-March.  But we have to continue teaching. From a distance. Through a computer. At first, it was novel. It was fun. The students would still be in their pajamas, or in their beds, or with a big towel wrapped around their wet hair piled on top of their head.

Now it's been over a month. I'm getting tired of it. I'm ready to go back.

How does one math teach virtually?

There have been many ideas thrown around about how to teach math from a distance. Sometimes it's difficult to filter out all of the options to figure out what is going to work for you and your students.

One thing I try to keep in mind is how many websites I'm going to ask my students to create an account for. We were already using DeltaMath.com, so that was easy to keep going. We had used edpuzzle.com at the beginning of the year. And of course, we have our LMS.

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I considered also using Go Formative, Quizizz, and Edulastic but in the end, I think I'm just going to use Google Forms as much as I can. 

I plan to experiment with Gimkit in the next few days (see my blog post about it here) and I'm planning on asking my students to use Flipgrid or Padlet in a couple of weeks for the How to Adult Project.

A screenshot of Gimkit.com

How I have been making distance learning work?

Since I didn't envision that teaching live during a Google Meet would be very effective, I decided to flip my classroom.

I make videos and upload them to edpuzzle. It works well for me.  I used to flip my classroom regularly about 7 years ago, so I was already comfortable with all the steps needed.

The scheduled Google Meet times then became my office hours. I take attendance, I remind them what they were supposed to have done before this meeting, I ask if they have questions (they usually don't), then I tell them what needs to be done before the next meeting. Lately, that whole process has taken only 10 minutes.

Getting more feedback from the students

Since the students were not asking questions during our Google Meets, and hence, they were only taking about 10 minutes, I decided I needed to find a way to get feedback from them; I needed to find out if they were understanding the lessons.

I decided to make some Digital Exit Tickets using Google Forms. 

When I assign these Google Forms, I ask the students to stay on the Google Meet with me while they work through the questions. 

There are 3 to 5 questions. Once they finish, they can stick around to ask me a question from the Exit Ticket, or they can leave the Google Meet and get started on the next assignment. 

I also like to add a question at the end along the lines of, "anything else you want me to know?" 

Some students are starting to share some of their feelings with me there. This has been nice because, in a normal classroom setting, I can get a sense of what is going on in their lives because either they tell me or I overhear them tell their classmates.  Being able to get a sense of what's happening in their lives is something that is really missing in the virtual setting.

I also like that I now have a record of who is really understanding what I am teaching in the videos and who is totally lost. I can use this information to reach out to individual students or to do a micro lesson during the next Google Meet.

Get some of my Exit Tickets and other FREE stuff here.

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