Spring Semester Professional Goal

Background: Midway through last semester in the middle of my unit on factoring, I realized that my grading system was not working. I had been thinking about it for a while, and finally just made up my mind to try standards based grading (SBG) for my tests and see what happened.

I loved it. I think it was a hard transition for the kids in the middle of the semester, so my goal this semester is to be more organized about how things are graded and presented. Enter: my resource website.

Over the Christmas break I went through and decided on objectives for each of my units, usually 4-6 and made a webpage just for that unit. My goal now is to link to resources for each of the objectives so students have specific places to go to read practice problems, watch a video or two, and do practice that gives them feedback.

Many of these links are to the typical sites: Khan Academy, cool math, purple math, Regents, etc. But, I'm trying to eliminate that extra need to search and evaluate what is helpful so that my students can get the help they need quickly when they need it most. I think it will also help the parents know where to direct their kids.

Also, I'm not using the district website for this endeavor since we all know how quickly they will change platforms and then all my beautiful work would be gone. I'm using the free web-service: www. weebly.com which I find to be very intuitive and easy to change.

My main website: mrs-hester.weebly.com

View of Unit 1: http://mrs-hester.weebly.com/unit-1-one-variable-equations-and-inequalities.html