Hashtag Closure

This was really fun.  My students loved it.  And it was different.  It brought out relevance and personality to the class.  It also gave a voice to some of my students.  Give it a try.  Thanks to my colleague Mary Martin (Via Steve Stack)  who gave me this idea.  

Ask your students to make a hashtag summary for the topic of the day (or week, or unit, or ?)  I used it as I closed the day out. Then ask them to share them out with the rest of the class.  You can share out results on the board.  Then have students vote on them.  Students loved it.  For those of you who do not know what a hashtag is…A hashtag is a word or an unspaced phrase prefixed with the hash character, # , to form a label.  Hashtags are used in social media as a type of tag to group information.  #postseason #edchat

I did this with my precalculus student's and they put a few things that were terrific and some things that were just plain funny.  We were studying rational functions and vertical asymptotes.
#ZeroDenom  #FindTheZerosInTheDenominator Some funny ones were #AskMrSladkey #Desmos.  I was talking about something the next day in class and said "remember the hashtag closure" from yesterday.  It was a great brain trigger.

Mary taught me to use Socrative.com to share out results.  It is so easy.  I had never used it before last week.

•          Log into socrative.com  and then teacher sign in. Go to Sign up.  Then go to profiles and change your room name to your last name.
•         Go to quick question.  Then click Short Answer question.  Type in your question.  Require students names.  Click Start
•         Have your students go to socrative.com and go to the student sign in.  ( I had my students use their phones)  Have them use your room name.  They don’t need to sign up.
•         When they answer the question it will show up on your screen for all to see.  After all have entered their answer, then vote on the result.

I hope you can give it a try today.

Dave