Google Slides with Always/Sometimes/Nevers -fascinating student interactions

Today in class I had one of those fun (and sadly rare) Great Activities I Didn’t Really Plan moments.

We had a list of Always-Sometimes-Nevers about parallelograms that I took from the CME Geometry book (thanks y’all!). I decided I wanted to spend about 25 minutes looking and thinking about those, but didn’t really plan in advance the best way to do it.

When the time came, this is what I decided to do at the last moment:

1. I put the students into groups of 3 or 4. Four groups. (Yes, I know I’m crazy lucky to only have 15 in a class).
2. I assigned each group 5 of the A/S/N questions to be responsible for. I said to hash it out amongst themselves, drawing pictures and making arguments to support their five. I gave them about 8 minutes to do this (which seemed to be enough).
3. While they hashed, I quickly threw together a Google Slides document with 20 numbered slides (used the Insert->Slide Number feature to create the slide number, then made it bigger on one slide and duplicated it 20 times). Then I shared it out to the girls via e-mail.
4. When they finished hashing, I told them to add their answers and their justifications to the correct page of the Google Slide. Most of them parceled out the problems internally, which worked well.
5. Once that was done, then I had them go back to groups, and essentially look at the next five slides (the last group rotated to the first five). They were to decide as a group if they agreed with the argument and write that in a comment or directly on the slide itself. If they did not agree, they need to add a reason or a battling justification. If they DID agree,they still needed to decide if the thought the argument itself was complete, or if there was more to be done.

At this point, class ended. I am going to be at NTCM Regionals (right here in my hometown of Nashville!) the next two classes, and part of their job on one of those days is going to be to get back in groups and continue this process through the last two groups of slides. Every group should have looked at every slide by then. They will then go through and look for disagreements and, as a class, decide their class answer (I’m still thinking of the best way to organize that – depends on the competence of my sub, I think). They then lock it down and move on to the next work. When we get back, I can check in.

I expect that as a group they will get 18 of the 20 right. there are two that have odd counterexamples I don’t think they are likely to discover with no direction (and since I won’t be there I can’t give the hints). I guess we will see!

Here’s the google slides presentation as it currently stands: