Most of the time, the order of the problem groups in a problem set will be fine. However, from time to time you might want to rearrange them– especially if some of the problems are “review”. This video will walk you through the simple process of rearranging the problem groups in a problem set.
A few of the users of ALOFT have commented on the fact that students don’t need any kind of password in order to work on their homework on this platform. That might seem surprising, since TEACHERS absolutely DO need a password. This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature — there are good reasons why the students should be able to access this without a second set of credentials (after they have already accessed Google Classroom or their school email or wherever the teacher distributed the link to the assignment).
Watch this video for all the details about why this is actually a good plan:
Teachers all know that the roster of a class changes throughout the course of a semester — sometimes a lot! Clearly, ALOFT needs to have a way to update a class list as changes happen. This video shows you how to do just that!
When I’m teaching Trig, one of the problems that I encounter early on is that the students seem to have trouble connecting the ideas of negative angles with the unit circle. So I went ahead and made a unit circle that has both the positive and the negative angles. I’m sure that other people have made similar things, but you can access the one that I made using this link on Desmos.
Students are going to want to have a quick video to watch to learn how to do their homework on ALOFT. This video is pretty “rough”, but it will get the job done for my “early adopters”!
I’ve created a new video that shows how to create a “problem set” in ALOFT. Remember, a “problem set” is a collection of “groups” of problems, much like you would have from a math textbook. Later, you’ll “assign” this to a class list.
Ready to start using ALOFT in your math classroom? You are going to need a “class list”, which you’ll upload to stratocumul.us. If you don’t have your final class list yet, that’s fine — you can always “update” a class list later. See the instructions for formatting and uploading a class list here.
It’s an exciting day for me — I just published the announcement of the website to social media! I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find a handful of like-minded (or contrary!) math teachers who would like to give the website a spin and see what works and what does not!
Additionally, I’m getting pretty close to releasing the latest new feature of the website– a new math visualization tool that I’m calling “Visibility”. Honestly, it’s a lot like other online graphing calculators, but I’ve written this one from scratch and it has a number of features that I am excited about. Much as was the case with the creation of ALOFT, honestly a big part of what I liked as I created Visibility was the fact that I had to think through all the challenges and decisions that go into a tool like this — I think that I learned a TON by doing this!
I’m really excited that the site is almost ready to launch — I think that I am still on track to be able to take on new teachers starting in January 2025! I’m hoping to find at least a few brave teachers who would like to experiment with the site and give me some feedback about all this stuff that I have created!