Gettin' crazy up in this BYOD

Alright, so check it out.  We just took this ridiculously long benchmark, right? Like, crazy ridiculous.  It wasn't even fair for the kids.  30 problems that included mixtures, point-slope form, 2 open-ended response questions with justifications, and a slew of other nonsense.  We took the test over 2 full days and kids still weren't finished.  Burned out from the test myself, I knew there was no way that they would look at that giant stack of terror with the same dose of sanity ever again... So we did something different.

Here's how things went down:

• I put the right answers to the forsaken test onto the board and had students check it against their bubbly sheet.  Yuck. 
  
• "Stevens, I didn't get how to do number 24... Can you help me?"
• Yep, just hang on
• Once students knew what problems they missed, I pointed out the QR codes hanging around the room and had them download a QR reader for their devices.  Oh boy, you're in for a treat (or so you think)
• I explained that each code was linked to a set of problems.  Each QR sent the students to a ShowMe video that detailed the steps of how to solve a chunk of the problems from the benchmark.
• Students found out which codes they needed to get up and scan (yes, get up.  As in, get out of your seat, move around, and enjoy being here!)
• They went, scanned, and sat back down to watch the video
• As they watched the video, they realized what they did incorrectly and wrote the correct step that they initially missed.
• Move on until all problems that you missed are addressed.

It looked a little something like this:

Based on what you've seen so far, this was a knockout, flawless lesson, right?  Well, it's more of a "what I want you to see" approach.  To be honest, we had a little bit of this:

You see, there's always one LG out there that'll screw everything up.  It's ok, I simply handed this student my iPhone and everybody was happy except for my phone's battery.  Oh well, that's why they make chargers, right?  When it was all said and done, there were very few problems that came up and those got addressed immediately.  If students couldn't watch a video because they had an outdated phone, they simply found another student who was working on the same problem and partnered up.  

If someone were to have walked into my room to evaluate me, their jaw would've hit the floor.  Kids were roaming around the room.  Students were using their... CELL PHONES.  Young adults had headphones on and were watching those videos you see on that Internet thing.  

Take a step back and it's a whole different story.  My students were doing one of the most boring and mundane (yet helpful, I'll give you that) exercise out there- re-doing test questions.  However, ask them what they're doing and they would've certainly come back with "watching videos to check what we missed" or "scanning QR codes to watch videos".  

Logistics

I took each page of the test and created a ShowMe screencast for it with full explanations of how to do the problems.

From there, I created QR codes for each one of the chunks using a QR Code Generator (by the way, it's free!)

I took all of the QR codes and hung them around the room, spreading them around so that students wouldn't bottleneck up to one specific point in the class.  Of course, I didn't take pictures of this because I was dealing with the issue of connectivity.  The system isn't perfect, but we manage.

Finally, the students scan the codes, watch the videos, and fill out their interactive notebooks with a reflective approach to a benchmark that grew horns every time the class even thought about it.  Not too bad for the first full-blown BYOD day in class!

Happy Fishing