Teacher Feature: Fun & Differentiated Lesson Designs

Samuel Frydman is a member of the NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) in the USA and has been teaching middle school math in New York for ten years. He has been using Deck.Toys enthusiastically and obsessively since he discovered our platform in September 2020 and is a Pro Plan user. In this feature, Samuel elaborates how he designs amazing lessons that are fun for both his students and himself! 

Deck.Toys: Hey Samuel, tell us more about yourself!

Samuel: I grew up in New Jersey. I came to New York for college and stayed for the pizza (shout out to Pizza Brook in Coney Island)! My wife, Tutu, was born and raised in Thailand. We met while she was an au pair and have been living in Brooklyn for over a decade now. In my spare time, I enjoy reading, biking when it’s warm, and skiing when it’s cold.

I have been teaching middle school math for ten years. For most of that time, I was teaching 7^th grade although I taught 8^th grade for a few years (including this year) and 6^th grade one year.

You can check out my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDO2dbRej7sQPtt5JL3-wfQ

Deck.Toys: How did you discover Deck.Toys?

Samuel:  I had been wondering how I would design my class for the 20-21 school year, knowing that a lot of it would be online because of COVID-19 (as it turned out, I became a fully remote teacher a couple months into the year). I decided to become a member of the NCTM to hear other people’s ideas. I love playing games with my students, so I started a discussion topic regarding fun game websites. 

Someone recommended Deck.Toys, and I was immediately intrigued! I started re-imagining my class design for the year and incorporated Deck.Toys as the main vehicle for delivering instruction. I would also like to mention that COVID-19 may have been the catalyst for my use of Deck.Toys, but I believe it’s perfect for in-class learning as well.

Deck.Toys: What features do you find particularly useful for your designing your lessons?

Samuel: A good and comprehensive lesson includes direct instruction, practice, differentiation, and, of course, fun! For direct instruction, Deck.Toys allows me to include as many videos as I want in each deck. I can give my students practice by including many different question types – some of which are automatically graded and some of which I look at – using a variety of the provided Slide Apps. 

The Checkpoint App in particular, allows me to make sure that students only move forward when they have shown me they know what they’re doing. I’ll typically pair this app with a Draw or Photo app so that students either draw their responses on the screen or do the work on a piece of paper and take a picture of it.

The Photo App actually spurred creativity in some of my students. One student began including artwork in almost every answer. This is just one of her many incredible pieces!

Deck.Toys: Could you elaborate on differentiation using Deck.Toys?

Samuel: One feature that completely sets Deck.Toys apart is the map format. Just like in the best video game of all time, Mario Bros. 3 (that’s a fact!), students make their way around the map in a non-linear way, completing activities as they go. This allows for differentiation because students are working at their own pace, and also teachers can link the activities in creative ways. 

I find the ability to create non-linear paths is also useful for teachers who want to give students some freedom, but also know that certain activities do have necessary prerequisites. For instance, teachers can design the map so that students can choose from paths A, B, or C, but they can only begin path D once they have completed A and C. As a math teacher, this is critical because many concepts are only comprehensible after others have been understood. Deck.Toys does a wonderful job in making this easy to achieve through an intuitive interface for linking activities as well as the ability to create entry locks that only unlock when certain criteria have been met.

Deck.Toys: What about the fun factor in Deck.Toys?

Samuel: Deck.Toys makes learning fun! That’s not just for the kids (and not just because of the fun interactive power-ups) – I have a blast making the decks as well! All the decks that I make now have a theme. It could be a carnival, Atlantis, skiing, a tropical paradise… anything.

Here’s one deck I made to illustrate my deck design, which is on Percent Word Problems with a Candyland theme: https://deck.toys/a/Q1A4FExxs

I find background pictures which are colorful and interesting to set the theme. On three of the activities – the entry point, “respite” (which is in the middle of the deck), and exit ticket – I’ll include some flavor text. I try to make these humorous (but I’ll let others decide how successful I’ve been!). 

I start with a joke at the entry point. When students get to the exit ticket, they’ll get to see the answer to the joke they saw at the beginning. The “respite” activity is meant as a break from the lesson where I’ll provide a link to a funny YouTube clip for the kids to watch (my favorite is the home shopping network guy who mistook a giant picture of a moth for a horse; look it up!). 

Of course, I’m very serious about my lessons too. The vast majority of videos I include are made by me and I try to be as thorough as possible. The activities that follow the videos are directly related to them. This school year, I’ve been able to play the role of the “guide on the side”. My students can watch the videos at any time of day and ask me for help when they need it as they work through the deck.

I have a whole curriculum of math decks following this design principle that have been shared in the Deck Gallery, check them out here:

https://deck.toys/profile/5f579df0e1d9140c0080f79f

Deck.Toys: We take it that the students are enjoying learning math on Deck.Toys?

Samuel: They love it!!! One of my students exclaimed during class that this is the way school should always be. Another time, the parent of a child who the administration was thinking about moving to another class e-mailed me requesting for her to stay where she was, in part because the child enjoyed doing the Deck.Toys maps in my class. Some kids are especially fond of the maze activities, others appreciate working at their own pace, others just can’t wait to save up 5,000 points to finger snap the rest of the class! Overall, the response has been far more positive than any other platform I’ve tried.

One week, I didn’t have time to create videos and everything else I normally put in my decks, so we did something else. The result? My class “revolted”! In my Google classroom stream, #bringbackdecktoys started trending and the class celebrated when I told them we would be doing Deck.Toys again the following week! 

Deck.Toys: Last question from us – what motivates you to keep using Deck.Toys for your medium of instruction?

Samuel: Ever since I started teaching, I’ve thought of myself as a mad scientist who’s constantly trying to find the right mix of strategies and material to get kids to learn. I’ve created tons of worksheets, games, videos, tests, and reference pages – I even coded a worksheet generator in Microsoft Excel for instantly creating new worksheets for a variety of topics. Deck.Toys is right up my alley because it opens up a whole new world of tinkering. 

I think a colleague of mine hit the nail on the head when he said the problem that teachers are ultimately trying to solve is how to give each kid the attention they need. This is not a trivial problem when the ratio of students to teachers is high. The way I used Deck.Toys this year was by creating full lessons which students could work on at their own pace. Students who were more independent could breeze through everything on their own, giving me more time to take questions from those who needed help. 

THANK YOU, Deck.Toys!

Deck.Toys:  And thank you for taking time to do this interview! We really appreciate it!

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