2015-04-29
Thank you for joining us for the Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed. The course is now officially closed for the semester. Certificates of completion have been awarded to all eligible participants who have requested a certificate. You will be able to access your course profile to download, print/save your certificate through June 1, 2015. Please be sure to download your certificate before then. If you have any difficulty accessing your certificate, please contact techsupport@mooc-ed.org. Please remember that we would love to hear from you as you begin to implement what you have learned. Hearing of your successes and struggles helps us to grow stronger as a community of educators. If you are interested in giving back to the Fraction Foundations learning community and extending the conversation, we are looking for educators who actively participated in the course to serve as discussion moderators for our next iteration of the course (tentatively Spring 2016). Please let us know if you are interested. The Fraction Foundations Team
2015-04-23
We want to thank each of you for joining us on this fractions journey. This was the second offering of the Fraction Foundations Course and we were again amazed at how much we learned from this community! We appreciated your courage and your candor in the forums and know that it led us through some difficult, but essential discussions. We are honored to have had the opportunity to share in this experience and grow alongside you! We hope that you have had a similar experience. As the design team worked on developing this course we had to make some very tough decisions on what to include. Through your feedback, discussions, and your contributions in the course we have learned a great deal about what you found most valuable for your practice. We have enjoyed your “aha moments” and have had several “aha moments” ourselves. Your feedback has led to discussions on what more we can offer and we hope that many of you will keep in touch with the team to let us know what is most needed. We have already heard from some of you that an in depth look at computations with fractions is much needed and are discussing possibilities for future courses. The most popular new course suggestions in the forum were Place Value and Elapsed Time. (But there is still time to post your opinion in the forum or to provide a quick vote using this one-question form.) Some highlights of the course for us included seeing the community come together! We loved to see the connections between teachers of varying grade levels, PD consultants connecting with teachers, and everyone sharing resources! We’d like to extend a special thank you to Cara who volunteered as a forum moderator in the Spring Course. She is a past participant that stepped up and gave her time to help out in our community. It is likely that you ran into her if you were in the forums on a regular basis. Her help is tremendously appreciated! If you are interested in giving back to the Fraction Foundations learning community and extending the conversation, we are looking for educators who actively participated in the course to serve as discussion moderators for our next iteration of the course (tentatively- Spring 2016). Please let us know if you are interested. We’d also love to hear your implementation stories, what is working/what is not and why! All of this great information provides another voice to share with future participants. We invite you to reach out to us to share your success and your struggles or to let us know what is needed in new courses. Finally, we would like to thank you for the wonderful recommended resources. We are looking forward to digging into them and borrowing from the great ideas that accompanied the resources in the forum discussions. We hope that you were able to bookmark and share your favorite resources from the course. If you have not yet saved your favorites, please do so before the course closes on Sunday. We will be accepting coursework through 12AM EST, April 27, 2015. Theresa and Shaun
2015-04-09
Dear Participants:
Certificates of Completion requested prior to 1PM, April 9, 2015 are currently available for download in your participant profile. If you are a participant from North Carolina, you will also be able to download your NC Renewal Credit Certificate.
Obtain your certificate:
1) Visit the course: https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/course
2) Log in
3) Select "Profile" from the header bar
4) Click the corresponding link to download your certificate
We will continue to accept certificate requests and course work through midnight, April 27, 2015 EST.
If you have any difficulty accessing your certificate, please contact techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
The Fractions Foundations Team
2015-03-27
Dear Participants:
Certificates of Completion requested prior to midnight, March 22, 2015 are currently available for download in your participant profile. If you are a participant from North Carolina, you will also be able to download your NC Renewal Credit Certificate.
Obtain your certificate:
1) Visit the course: https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/course
2) Log in
3) Select "Profile" from the header bar
4) Click the corresponding link to download your certificate
We will continue to accept certificate requests and course work through midnight, April 27, 2015 EST.
If you have any difficulty accessing your certificate, please contact techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
The Fractions Foundations Team
2015-03-15
Dear Participants: We have reached our final Unit in the Fraction Foundations Course! We truly enjoyed this journey with you! In Unit 5, we have added our team reflections on the “What Would You Do Next?” videos that were presented in the course and hope that you enjoy hearing “what we would do next”. Here are a few reminders about the Wrap Up and Next Steps. Course Timeline: The course is beginning to wrap up, but do not panic if you are not exactly on schedule. We understand your busy schedule and need to flex timelines. The course will continue on the formal schedule (Unit 5, 3/16-3/22) and remain open through April 26, 2015 for completion.
Final Project/Feedback: If you have not yet submitted your project, please do so in the Project Submissions and Feedback forum. We ask that you provide feedback on projects submitted by others (you may provide feedback to either category (classroom activities or alternative project) regardless of your type of project completed. This is a great opportunity to share lessons, ideas, and resources! We ask that you submit your project to the corresponding forum for classroom activities or alternative projects.
Post-Survey: We invite you to provide feedback on your MOOC-Ed experience and the course by participating in this end of course "post-survey". Your feedback is important to our team--regardless of your extent of participation. Certificate of Completion: Participants who are interested in obtaining a certificate of completion should review the requirements for receiving a certificate. Participants have to attest to and meet the stated requirements, and submit the certificate request form in Unit 5 by midnight April 27, 2015 EST. Participation will be verified and certificates will be provided in your course profile for download. We will send out a course notification when certificates are available. We hope that you have enjoyed your time with us! -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations registration is open for one more week, designed for educators in Grades 6-14! Follow us on Twitter; @FIMathEd
If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-03-08
Dear Participant- Unit 4 of the Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed is well underway! Visit the course at: https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/preview We wanted to offer a couple of important reminders as we head into the second week of Unit 4. Course Timeline: The course is beginning to wrap up, but do not panic if you are not exactly on schedule. We understand your busy schedule and need to flex timelines. The course will continue on the formal schedule (Unit 4, 3/2-3/15 and Unit 5, 3/16-3/22) and remain open through April 26 for completion. Project Creation and Feedback: Project submissions have started to flow in! We encourage you to submit a draft of your project during Unit 4 to allow time for your colleagues to provide feedback. We also ask that you provide feedback on projects submitted by others. This is a great opportunity to share lessons, ideas, and resources! We are not using the “letter groups” to separate the project submissions, but do ask that you submit to the corresponding forum for classroom activities or alternative projects. Certificates of Completion: If you are pursuing a certificate of completion, please remember that the project is a requirement of course completion. Projects and request for Certificates of Completion will be accepted through April 27, 2015, 12AM EST. (The certificate request form will be available in Unit 5.) -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! Opening tomorrow March 9, we have the Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations Course, designed for educators in Grades 6-14! Follow us on Twitter; @FIMathEd
If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-03-01
Dear Participant- Unit 4 of the Fraction Foundations: Helping Students Understand Fractions MOOC-Ed is open today! In Unit 4, we will focus on supporting student understanding of computations with fractions building on fair sharing and number line activities. Core Resources: You may notice that the core resources component has more offerings than usual, which results from the inclusion of all four operations. We have categorized the resources into “General Computation Resources” and “Classroom Video Resources”. We encourage you to engage with those that you feel align well with your professional goals. Please do not feel rushed to “get through it all”, the course content and resources will remain available through April 26. It is important to us that you have ample time to engage with the course resources. Project Creation and Feedback: In Unit 4 we ask you to create your final project based on student interview that you may have conducted and what you have learned throughout the course. Project submissions and feedback will take place over the course of Units 4 and 5. We encourage you to submit a draft during Unit 4. This will allow time for your colleagues to provide feedback. We also ask that you provide feedback on projects submitted by others. This is a great opportunity to share lessons, ideas, and resources! We are not using the “letter groups” to separate the project submissions, but do ask that you submit to the corresponding forum for classroom activities or alternative projects. Certificates of Completion: If you are pursuing a certificate of completion, please remember that the project is a requirement of course completion. Final project submissions and requests for certificates will also be accepted through April 26. (The certificate request form will be available in Unit 5.) We are looking forward to hearing all of your ideas around computation with fractions! -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! Opening March 9, we have the Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations Course, designed for educators in Grades 6-14! Follow us on Twitter; @FIMathEd If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-02-23
Dear Participant- Unit 3 of the Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed is well underway! We wanted to offer a couple of important reminders as we head into the second week of Unit 3. Experience with Number Lines and Measurement: Many participants have been sharing their experiences and great resources about Number Lines and Measurement! Take a look at the forums to see what is working for your colleagues and reflections on their implementation experience. If you have not tried one of the activities with your students yet, we encourage you to do so! They are also very interesting to try with adults -- we encourage you to give it a try! Additional Resources: We would like to point you to this page if you haven’t had a chance to drop in there yet. We have added resources including more classroom videos using manipulatives with fraction instruction. Participants also shared some great resources in the forums, we have offered a collection of resources shared by our Fall participants and those we have come across so far this Spring! Final Project Information: We have received some requests in the unit feedback form for more information on the course project. We have put together a quick overview document of the project plan for you to review. We appreciate the feedback, please continue to provide it as it helps up to continuously improve the course. -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! Opening March 9, we have the Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations Course, designed for educators in Grades 6-14! Follow us on Twitter; @FIMathEd If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-02-23
Dear Participants-
The link to the course in this morning's communication was incorrect. Please use this updated link to access the Fraction Foundations Course:
https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/preview
We apologize for any inconvenience.
The Fraction Foundations Team
2015-02-15
Dear Participant- Unit 3 of the Fraction Foundations: Helping Students Understand Fractions MOOC-Ed is open today! In Unit 3, we will consider how to use measurement and number line activities in teaching and learning fractions. Constructive feedback: We appreciate the feedback for Units 1 and 2 and are very happy to see that you have valued many of the resources! In response to a high demand for additional examples with manipulatives, we have added a resource of videos at the K-4 mathematics instruction level with accompanying supporting documents to Unit 3’s additional resources. Links to libraries geared toward older grade levels (5-12) are also available on the website. Discussion forums: It is wonderful to see the conversations from Unit 1 continue and we hope that you will continue to bookmark and follow helpful discussions throughout the course. We are really enjoying the constructive discussions around 5/8 vs 5/4 (of what?) and whether it is harder to partitions different shapes and partitioning into odd numbers from Unit 2 and look forward to hearing more about your students’ reactions. Project reflections and ideas: It is great to see the reflections and project ideas coming into the Unit 2 forum! If you haven’t checked out the project forums yet, we encourage you to do so! The reflections are very thought-provoking and offer great ways to get ideas for when you are ready to try activities out! The alternative project forum has some great trail blazers offering creative ways to support and/or implement instruction! We look forward to working with you through Unit 3! -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! Opening March 9, we have the Teaching Statistics Through Data Investigations Course, designed for educators in Grades 6-14! Follow us on Twiiter; @FIMathEd
If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-02-05
Dear Participant- Unit 2 of the Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed is well underway! We have really enjoyed your discussion around Emily, especially the depth of discussion around the wording of tasks, considering the whole, instructional decisions around when to compliment, wait and listen, redirect, instruct further, or back track, and how and when to use manipulatives, along with many other ideas. What great conversations and progress! We are already starting to see interesting discussions around Kira, Myles, and fair sharing in Unit 2!
Visit the course at https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/course. We wanted to offer a couple of important reminders as we head into the second week of Unit 2. Registration closes tomorrow February 6th. If you know interested colleagues, they will need to register before then! We will leave the pre-assessment open for the weekend to allow those who join us on Friday time to engage with it. *The pre-assessment is one of the requirements for earning a certificate of completion.* If you are planning to request a certificate you must finish the pre-assessment before it closes at midnight EST, Sunday February 8th. Forum Updates: We appreciate your feedback for Unit 1. We are glad to hear that you found the core resources and expert panel useful and have added some features to the forum to help improve navigation through the many discussions. A quick video on the updates is available here. Try It! We are looking forward to hearing about your experiences trying fair sharing activities with students. If you are not working with students at this time, we encourage you to try this out with adults, who might share interesting strategies and reasoning too! -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! Follow us on Twiiter; @FIMathEd If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-02-01
Dear Participant- Unit 2 of the Fraction Foundations: Helping Students Understand Fractions MOOC-Ed is open today! We have really enjoyed the rich and challenging discussions in Unit 1, and are excited to look into the many resources that you have mentioned in the forums. As new Units open, you will continue to have access to all prior Units' content and forums for the duration of the course.
Visit the course at: https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/course In Unit 2, we will consider fair-sharing activities and how they can be used in teaching fractions. New in Unit 2! Extended Timeline: In order to allow time for participants to try what they are learning about, Units 2, 3, and 4 will be offered over a period of two weeks each. In these units we also provide an additional resources page for those who would like to explore additional content. Self Assessment Reflection Items: This feature is offered in Units 2, 3, and 4. It is an opportunity to reflect on problems similar to those you experienced taking the pre-assessment. Full solutions are offered and available for download in both PDF and Word format. We encourage you to use these items to reflect on your understanding as we move throughout the course, consider multiple student strategies and misconceptions, and save the tasks for potential use with students (when modified) or preservice/in-service teachers. Additional Resources: These resources are offered for those participants that would would like to continue their exploration beyond the core resource materials. Discussion Forum Tips: Discussions remain open for the duration of the course. You can access all discussions by clicking the word “Forum” in the header bar of the course. Remember to click the star in the upper right corner of discussions that you would like to follow, this will turn on email notifications for that discussion. A forum tutorial is available here and a quick guide is available here. Descriptive titles are recommended for new threads. This will allow colleagues with like interests to easily locate discussions. "I have a folding strategy that has worked in the past", "Does anyone have a strategy for ____?", or "Are there any 3rd grade teachers with ideas about _____". Reflection on _______________Resource Registration and the Pre-Assessment close after this week: Its not too late to invite your colleagues to join us! Registration and the pre-assessment will remain open throughout the first week of Unit 2, closing on February 6th. We are pleased to share that we now have participants from 49 out of 50 states and 27 countries outside of the US! We would love to have the voice of Wyoming represented and there is still time! If you know anyone teaching there, encourage them to be a voice for their state. -The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Enjoying your MOOC-Ed experience? Visit MOOC-Ed.org to sign up for additional courses and/or share the link with your colleagues! You can also help us improve the MOOC-Ed experience by participating in the Friday Institute MOOC-Ed Research Project. Click here for more details. Follow us on Twiiter; @FIMathEd If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-01-29
Dear Participants-
The MOOC-Ed technical team reached out to let us know that some participants are having difficulty locating the Fraction Foundations Course. It appears that some browsers did not highlight the course link in the opening email, while other browsers did. We apologize if this caused any confusion and wanted to be sure that each participant is able to join us!
The course can be accessed at: https://courses.mooc-ed.org/fractions2/preview
Once you have reached the course page:
1) log in can be found in the upper right hand corner
2) scroll down to below the gray area
3) click the hyperlink to unit 1
We look forward to having you join us!
If you have any difficulty accessing the course, please reach out to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
The Fraction Foundations Team
2015-01-25
MOOC-Ed Participants- Today is the official start of the Fraction Foundations: Helping Students Understand Fractions MOOC-Ed! This week we will examine the complexity of fractions from a student perspective and some challenges that students and teachers face with fractions. We will consider local standards and how they relate to our course content, explore the concept of deeper learning, and begin to plan the course project. Getting Started Unit 1 Now Open! You can login to the course using your Google username and password. Click Login on the upper right side of your screen. Once you are logged in, please scroll down and select Unit 1. Pre-Assessment: We offer a course pre-assessment in unit 1. Although you will not receive a numeric score, we hope that taking this assessment will help you gauge your areas of strength and identify areas where you would like to improve. The pre-assessment is required for participants interested in obtaining a certificate of completion. Discussion Forum: Discussions are taking place now with people from all over the world. We are enjoying all of the introductions and are looking forward to learning with and from you. Be sure to check your forum profile where you can update your personal information, modify your notification preferences, and choose whether to show or hide your email address. If this is your first MOOC-Ed experience, please know that the best way to get started is to just jump right into Unit 1! Registration will be open through the first two weeks, feel free to encourage colleagues to join us. We look forward to seeing you in the MOOC-Ed! The Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed Team Follow us on Twitter @FIMathEd
If you are having any technical difficulties, please send an email to techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2015-01-19
Dear Participant: Thank you for joining us in this Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed! We look forward to working with you and learning together throughout this course. The course officially begins on January 26, one week from today. We will send a weekly email communication throughout the course to keep you up to date on course information. Available Now: Take the Course pre-assessment: Once you are logged in, scroll down to the course schedule and select Unit 1. The pre-assessment (Item 1.2) is available starting today! Although you will not receive a numeric score, we hope that taking this assessment will help you gauge your areas of strength and identify areas where you would like to improve. Introduce yourself in the Forums: Log in to the course and introduce yourself in the Forum (located in the header bar of the course). Get started by connecting with colleagues around the world. Invite your colleagues: It is not too late to invite your colleagues to join the course. Registration will remain open for the first two weeks of the course. We encourage PLCs to take advantage of a blended learning experience! Connect on Twitter: Follow us on twitter! @FIMathEd #fractions We are looking forward to a great course! Regards, The Fraction Foundations Team If you experience any technical difficulties during the course, please contact techsupport@mooc-ed.org.
2012-10-06
Welcome to the Fraction Foundations MOOC-Ed!
Information for the course will be received via the email address that you used to register. You will receive a reminder notification prior to the start of the course. Once the course has begun, you will receive a weekly communication from the course team.
We look forward to working with you! Detailed course information can be found now on the course page.
