I do not have enough white board space in my geometry classroom. I am working on getting an entire wall covered, but I can’t just put up my own stuff, and it is a slow process. Until it happens, I can’t really do full-fledged Vertical Non-Permanent Surfaces work the way I would sometimes like.
Though technology certainly can’t recreate ALL of the advantages of that sort of work, I have had good luck the last few days combining our tablet computers with Google Slides to make it easy to at least get the “see lots of students work at once and comment on good work / mistakes” aspect of it.
My process:
I give students a task, either to work on alone or in pairs. This has ranged from something as simple as “Draw an obtuse triangle and all three of its altitudes” to “Convert the HL theorem to standard Image-Given-Prove form to set up our proof of the theorem”. They usually work on this on OneNote, my preferred choice for notes organization and pen-based input on our Tablet PCs.
I share them a link to a blank Google Slides document, titled with the activity and block. They open that link from an e-mail or directly from the OneNote document if I was able to get it built in advance.
Each person/group adds a page to the document, then uses the Snipping Tool to take a picture of it onto their slide. As they do, I can keep an eye on how many have shown up, and see a small picture of them in the outline on the left. They sometimes put their names on it, sometimes not (though of course I can see who added what by examining the editing history, if I really need to).
Finally, I either pair students up to look at each others work and add feedback directly to the slide, or I run through them myself and give commentary.
Here’s an example from today’s class:
This has been great. It gives me a slightly faster way to check that they are all in a good place, allows students to express just a little bit of personal creativity in a quick way, and helps clarify common mistakes. They seem to like it, and I like it too..