A few of you know the crazy and wild journey that I have been on over the last year. It’s an interesting story but that is a story for another day. 🙂

Currently, my journey has led me to teach Math in high school – ironically, the high school in which all of my former middle school students attend. It’s pretty amazing to watch these students grow up from middle school to high school. It’s amazing how much they have grown and how they are starting to think towards their future.

Anyways, I am currently teaching Integrated I to a group of students with a wide range of knowledge and ability. Some of the students in my class were in my Honors class at the middle school, some of the students were in regular Math classes, and some of my students were in special education classes and have now been mainstreamed. It’s a huge range of students and it can certainly be a challenge – but I am loving every second of it.

At the moment, we are learning how to write in interval notation – such as, where the graph increases and decreases, domain and range. It’s not a topic that aligns smoothly to real-world concepts. Learning how to read graphs can be a real-world skill, but writing in interval notation is not always the form used “in the real world”. Yet, it is a standard that we are required to learn.

So, I found myself thinking about SAMR and I began feeling the all too common pressure to reach Modification/Redefinition. Then, I reminded myself to slow down. I reminded myself that there are times when practicing skills are okay and even necessary. However, if I am going to ask students to practice skills while using technology, then there has always been one “must have” for me: immediate feedback. I’ve always said that if we are going to be at DOK 1, then immediate feedback is a must-have for students. In addition to this, by offering students immediate feedback through technology, the level of SAMR easily jumps from Substitution to Augmentation.

Enter….Google Sheets! To help students practice the skills of interval notation while offering immediate feedback, I created an activity in Google Sheets where students have to respond to questions based on a graph. When the answer is correct, it turns green. When it is incorrect, it turns red.

Interested in creating your own? Click HERE to make your own copy and watch the video below!

While I haven’t given this assignment to my students yet, I know that there will be some frustration if their cell remains red. However, it is a great conversation to have with students about perseverance and mathematical precision. Even if we get frustrated, at times. 🙂

How do you provide immediate feedback to students? What technology tools do you use? Share in the comments below!