More things to know

Other ideas about things for a first-day survey that I got from a book called [will fill in]

What do you prefer to be called (nickname, etc.)?

Your home phone number:

Your parent(s)/guardian(s) first and last names and work numbers:

Does your family have Internet access at home?

Does your family have a DVD player?

What grade do you expect to get in this class?

What do you expect to learn in this class?

What do you think makes a good teacher?

What do you think makes a good student?

Do you have any medical problems or anything else I should be aware of?

How do you see yourself using math in the future and in your life?

Are you more comfortable speaking & writing another language besides English?

New Teacher Induction

This week all teachers that were new to the district participated in 3 days of New Teacher Induction; the first day was on my birthday, which I'm hoping is a good omen!

Overall I enjoyed it. There were definitely some boring speeches, but I learning a lot about my campus and the district and am [marginally] more relaxed now about starting school.

The first day was at my campus, where we were loaded up with new teacher documents and enough school and district paraphernalia (pom-poms, mugs, buttons, etc.) to last us until retirement. By far the best part was a neighborhood tour - they loaded us in vans and showed us the areas where our students lived! It was wonderful, not because I learned so much, but because it told me that the school really wanted to help us get to know our students and their circumstances. We ended the drive with a stop at a local Hispanic market (our students are 90% Hispanic) and were given time to wander around and look at it.

The next two days were at the district, and the first day's morning was taken up by fairly boring talking heads talking about the district, the union, benefits, special ed, etc. - important stuff, but brain frying. But for the rest of our time we were with our content specialists. My district's content specialist had actually taught part of my math methods class in my teacher certification program, so I already knew she was great. There are education teachers that teach by explaining one edulingo term after another, and there are ed teachers that teach...y'know, material, how to apply education research, useful tips, silly stuff like that. ;-) I enjoyed my time there and especially enjoyed the little things they did to help us feel more at home, like providing tables for all new teachers from one campus to sit together.

I also joined the local teacher's union, which is part of the Arizona Education Association (AEA) and the National Education Association (NEA). I was of two minds about it because of my neutral attitude towards NEA and the cost, but I really believe in unions (gathering together to change a situation by the power of combined economic interest - how pinko commie!) and the local union came highly recommended. So don't mess with me - yer talkin' to a union member!

Open Source and Creative Commons License

My fiancee is very invested into and passionate about the open source movement, and he's sucked me into it. I'm now using open source software, etc.

One thing I just did was license this blog, Sines of Learning, and its companion webpage the Sines of Learning Document Page under a related license:

the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Creative Commons is a non-profit that provides the necessary legal language to license your creative works (writings, art, etc). They help you pick the right license based on what you want. In my case, the only thing I wanted was that neither my work nor anything built on it be used for commercial purposes. After all, if I give it away free, everyone else should too! So I used the following language (generated by the Choose a License feature) on both:

"Sines of Learning is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Based on a work at
sinesoflearning.blogspot.com

Some rights reserved. No attribution necessary."

I added the "No attribution necessary." because the license specifies that attribution must be given according to the originator's instructions. I'm not worried about getting credit for it. I just want to know that if I ever create something that is some use to some one, somewhere, they can use it for free.

Please consider copyrighting your own blog and materials under a Creative Common license too!

Good Math & Education Blogs - Ongoing

I'm going to use this post to keep track of the many blogs I've read and enjoyed. It'll be continuously updated and I'll link to it in a later post whenever I do.

I'm dividing the blogs I read into 3 categories: dead blogs (blogs no longer active) that are worth reading, live blogs, and great blogs. I'll be adding the third category to the sidebar on this page but keeping the first two categories here.

If I put a blog on here I'll add if I have not read through the entire archives. I find going through the archives really valuable for learning about the writer and his/her style. And who says the only useful things are posted the same day I found the blog?

Dead Blogs

Blog of a Math Teacher: Great insight into struggles of new math teachers. Be warned, his career in secondary school ends unhappily and can be depressing. Fortunately, he moved to community college and seemed, as of May 2006, to be happy there.

Live Blogs

Coffee & Graph Paper: This blog is unfortunately slow, because the author writes about conceptual problems her students have, as well as concrete things she does in her classroom that can insipire you.

Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere: Another slow but good blog, from a new teacher in a private school. One of the best things about it is that his sister is his major reader and commenter.

Math Notes: A new teacher who writes a lot about her personal experiences in the classroom. A nice read.

My Teaching Philosophy: DTA

A couple of weeks ago when I told someone (at a campus ministry I still attend) that I was going to start teaching, she asked me what my teaching philosophy was. My answer: "Um...uh...what do you mean, exactly?"

Since then, I've come across the word "automaticity" (which, yes, I had not heard before *hangs head*) in an education article, and I liked it because it helped me to verbalize my answer to the math wars.

People vehemently against constructivism point out examples of students taught with a discovery-based curriculum that still can't do things like basic multiplication facts (7x4) as fast as those taught with direct instruction. But what is the point in memorizing 7x4=28 in these days of calculators?

Don't get me wrong - I am NOT saying that basic arithmetic facts don't need to be learned. I constantly get frustrated with high school and college students that can't do basic arithmetic, because it hampers the teaching of higher-order thinking skills when we have to break stride to cover fractions or negatives.

No, I think that being fluent in arithmetic is very important. But I also believe that in a calculator-filled world, there is no fundamental difference between someone who doesn't know 7x4, and someone who has memorized 7x4=28 because they copied it repeatedly on 500 worksheets.

Memorization has been made obsolete, but automaticity is more important than ever. Wikipedia's article on automaticity describes it as the point where a skill is learned so well that the lower level thinking is no longer needed - it has become automatic like driving or riding a bike. I no longer spell out C-A-T when I see cat, and I no longer add 7+7+7+7 to get 7x4, but I do understand how to start over from the beginning to explain my thinking to myself or others if I need to. And that is what gives me deep fluency in both English and math.

If my algebra kids know 7x4=28 but don't know why, it doesn't help us when we get to factoring, or finding common denominators, or finding areas and volumes, or any of that. Memorized facts can only be used in a few narrow ways.

But the DI people are right about one thing. A student that can explain 7x4 as 7+7+7+7, and 4+4+4+4+4+4+4, and the number of squares in a rectangle 7 units long and 4 units across....but still has to punch it into the calculator, is almost as (if not equally) hampered as the one who memorized the phrase "Sayvun thymes foe-rr ees tventi aight."

Discovery by itself isn't enough. Memorization by itself isn't...well, anything, unless you're Amish. But a teaching philosophy that promotes going from discovery to automaticity can prepare students for the world.

There's my teaching philosophy: DTA. Discovery To Automaticity. Let's see how long it lasts!

Who I Am (First Day Survey)

Even though I haven't posted in several days, I've still been working on several ideas for my Algebra 1 classroom (except for the past two days, when I've been enjoying myself in Sedona). I'll try to catch this blog up to my work in the next few days. The following idea is stolen 95% from Dan Meyers at dy/dan.

He made up a first-day survey that was made up of all kinds of geometric shapes and it looked like so much fun compared to my previous list-surveys, I had to use it. But, I wanted to change the questions and his download was only in PDF form.

So, being the I-wanna-do-it-myself kind (which I have to watch out for, I know) I made my own. Its similar but not exactly the same as Dan's, and I centered it around the themes of past, present, and future:



The only questions about math are "What did your previous math teachers do that you liked/disliked?"

Right now, my plan is to use this as my bellwork on the first day, with my answers up on the document camera (doc cam) as an example. Then going over some basic rules and procedues, having everyone share from the survey, and ending with a mini-quiz that doesn't factor into their grades but helps me find out where they are in math.

I'm also considering taking the surveys and printing a second half on the back for day 2, with more math-centered questions. Then when I get them back a second time I'll have lots of info for each child on one sheet. On the other hand, if I scan them, it won't matter where the second page is. Still thinking on this one.

You can download Word and PDF copies of the Who I Am survey at the Sines of Learning Document Page. If you want to change the shapes or questions, open the Word file. The shapes are made using Word Insert>Picture>Autoshapes, and the questions are put in using Insert>Text Boxes. I made some of the text boxes go "sideways" by going to Format>Text Direction.

Have fun! And let me know what you think!

This Blog's Reading Level

Considering that my 9th graders will have the English skills of middle school (if I'm lucky), can I spin this into a good thing? ;-)

TV Reviews

Class Logo - Turtle

When I find a new blog I really like I often go back to the beginning of its archives and read all the way through; by the end its like reading a rough draft of a book (and if its a good blog, of a good book!)

Right now I'm working my way through the archives of dy/dan, an overachiever math teacher with great tips on design, useful assessment, and education in general. He writes like he takes himself too seriously, which is tiring sometimes, but his blog is full of information and I've learned more than I can say - and I'm only as far as September 2007.

Anyway, on either his blog or a blog he linked to, I read about a teacher that each year painstakingly develops a "class logo" for his math class. The idea struck me, and I decided to do the same.

I've recently realized how much I love graphic design and art, though I have no training. I love to build web pages and actually, when I excitedly told my SO about my turtle, he suggested that he subcontract out the design part of his webpage-building work to me! So now I've got another thing to do this year ;-)

Anyway, for my computer art my main tool is......Microsoft Paint. :-/ Yup, that flimsy little app that comes along free with any version of Windows. I also use Microsoft Fireworks, but so far I draw things so infrequently that I keep forgetting what I've learned about Fireworks. So in the end I work mostly in Paint, moving to Microsoft Word or Fireworks for a couple of tools that Paint doesn't have.

So. With only Paint (and Fireworks to tilt and shrink it) as well as some Webdings fonts to get pi, the approximately equals sign, the multiplication star, and a capital J to outline, we have: my class turtle!



Okay, its not much...but I made it in Paint! And its CUTE! I plan to use it all over my class, since I'm going to have a kind of "turtle theme" (just some turtle-y stuff popping up here and there, when its not expected)

Also, the tail is the outline of the letter "J", which is in my name.

Please note, I would like it if you would not use, share, and/or change my turtle. You are welcome to absolutely anything else on this blog, but my turtle's kinda personal.

Anyway, I plan to put my tiny turtle in different places on all handouts and PPT presentations, just to give a kind of unifying theme to my class.

Yes, its totally amateurish compared to the giants of dy/dan and the School 2.0 proponents he loves to hate, but its a beginning! And, it's cute. I like it. For my first year, at least, "That'll do, Pig. That'll do."

Bellwork and Closure

One of the things that worked really well for me during student teaching was to have separate papers for Bellwork and Closure. I was considering only having a separate paper for Closure, since that's what I want to look at closely every day, but I think the kids may ignore bellwork if I only look at it every few weeks during notebook checks.

So here are my forms:

You can see my Bellwork form in Word or PDF form on the Sines of Learning Document Page.

Here's the top:



The double line and HW questions are copied lower down for Tuesday, and for W Th and F on the back of the paper.

I'm hoping that this will encourage reflection on the students' part. I want them not just to do their homework, but to ask themselves the question "What does this tell me? How well did I understand how to do this?" Hopefully this will encourage them to contemplate their grasp of the material before the test.

However, the Closure paper is much more important to me than the Bellwork one.

You can see my Closure form in Word or PDF form on the Sines of Learning Document Page as well.

Here's the top:



If there is one thing I look at at the end of the day, I want the Closure paper to be it. First, I want the kids to reflect on how well they grasped the P.O. - Performance Objective. Also, the questions on the Closure will be less problems and more writing questions, with "Why?" and "How?" questions. I will also tell the kids that the Closure is the way to communicate with me if they don't want to share something out loud in class. They can give their feedback on the class, what confused them, and what interested them. I'm then going to ask them to paperclip their group's Closures together and put them in a basket on the way out. Every night I'll skim through them, or at least some of them, and since they are written responses instead of math problems, it'll be easier and more interesting for me... at least, that's my hope!

[ETA: I asked my mother for her feedback, and she pointed out that my original P.O. ratings (identical to the HW ones) were somewhat vague. So we changed them to what you see in the screen shot above.

Then, at least for the first few weeks, I'll write out the complete sentences so the kids know what I mean.

For example, if my Performance Objective on the board is: Today I will be able to find the equation of a line from its graph.

On my Closure PPT slide I'll have

1 - I don't know how to start finding the equation of a line from its graph
2 - I can start but can't finish finding the equation of a line from its graph
3 - I can sometimes finish finding the equation of a line from its graph
4 - I'm ready to show I can find the equation of a line from its graph

I've updated the Closure_Paper.pdf and Closure_Paper.doc on the Sines of Learning Document Page.

ETAA (edited to add again): I figured out how to do screen shots and put up the pretty pictures :-)
]

Well, take a look. As always, any feedback is much appreciated!

Choosing Class Rules Part I

One of my tasks over the summer is to choose my class rules. I've been reading both Tools for Teaching, and The First Days of School by Harry Wong, and the latter suggests distinguishing class rules from class procedures, the former being general codes of conduct and the latter being precise sets of directions. This makes a lot of sense to me, so I'm trying to come up with mine so I can get my poster made as soon as I have access to my school campus.

Last semester during student teaching these were the class rules my mentor teacher used:

1. Come to class prepared with all materials.
2. When the bell rings, be in your assigned seat quietly starting bellwork.
3. No personal grooming, electronics, food or drinks (except water) during class time.
4. When I call for attention, give me your raised hand, eyes, & silence immediately.
5. Be silent & pay attention when teacher is talking.

I later modified them and put up my own poster, as she encouraged me to take ownership of our classroom as much as possible, but I can't remember all our changes.

Still, here are the things I'm considering for my class rules this year:

* Come to class prepared with all materials & positive attitude.
* When the bell rings be in your seat and start the bellwork.
* No personal grooming, electronics, food or drinks (except water) in class.
* Do not talk when the teacher is talking.
* Discuss grades or class expectations after class.
* Follow all school and district rules.
* Be attentive, productive, and creative!
* Be respectful towards the teacher and your classmates.
* Do not interfere with the learning process of another.

I'm probably going to drop the one about the bell ringing as I think it fits more under "procedure" than "rule." Before I finish this post, I'm going to reread First Days of School (FDOS) and look at their suggestions...

I don't look on FDOS as the wonderful book that many other people have told me it is; I think its far too vague and full of edu-speak, but there are still many useful things in it especially for a first-year teacher.

What I got out of my latest reading was: 1) What are the basic things that, if my kids did them, I would be delighted? and 2) Rules are about behavior, not academic achievement.

Yes, yes, nothing brilliant or new, but it helped anyway. When I look at my list I'm now asking "What were the 5 most fruatrating behaviors in student teaching that wore me out mentally and emotionally?" FDOS also suggests more specific rules for new or struggling teachers, so I've cut my list down to this:

* Discuss grades or class expectations after class.
Huge, huge, huge problem for me. If I have this up, any time a kid tries to complain about my activities, assignments, rules or procedures, I can silently point to my class rules poster.
* Follow all school and district rules.
I constantly got "but its not on the list, why can't I?" when it came to enforcing school and district policies. Part of it is that I was at a campus with HORRIBLE inconsistencies in enforcing rules, but I'd like to cut that on off at the knees.
* Pay attention and don't talk while the teacher is talking.
Single biggest problem, of course.

At this point I'm running out of room, but I really wanted to end it with the positive note "Be attentive, productive, and creative!" Still, after trying it out, the poster was just too crowded. I've decided to make a separate poster saying "Be attentive, productive, and creative" and my final set of classroom rules (as of today, at least) is this:



If you want to download my poster to use, share, and/or change, you can download it here: Class_Rules_Poster.pdf or Class_Rules_Poster.ppt, on the Sines of Learning Document Page.

Tools For Teaching Part I

One of the most useful resources I've come across was Fred Jones's works. Even though the teacher certification program I went through was great in many respects, we had -no- training in classroom management (big surprise, right?). Once I asked the best teacher we had, our math methods teacher who had been a classroom teacher herself, and her response was "The best discipline plan is a good lesson plan." Riiiiiight. There's tons of truth to that, but every trainee in the classroom knew we needed more than that!

During my student teaching last semester, I was quickly approaching burn-out when I went to a local public library and browsed through their catalogue for books on classroom management (my mentor teacher had already given by Wong's First Days of School, which is great, but I needed something more). I came across a set of books by Fred Jones called Positive Classroom Discipline and Positive Classroom Instruction. "Hey, sounds good" I thought, and checked out both. What I found blew my mind away, and I quickly bought the first edition of Tools for Teaching off of amazon.com. I also eventually paid for myself to go to his 3-day conference in Phoenix, AZ, and there got a free copy of the second edition with the accompanying DVD. The following is my review of the latest Tools for Teaching book.

Tools for Teaching, Second Edition, by Fred Jones is the best book that I have come across on classroom management so far. He divides up his system for managing a class into 3 fundamental parts: classroom structure, limit setting, and motivation using Preferred Activity Time (PAT).

Anyone can read the book, so I'll keep my summary short. He brings all his advice together in Chapter 25: Exploiting the Management System, as a ladder of responsibility. Everything is first built on 1) Classroom Structure, which includes Discipline (room arrangement, carefully teaching routines, and constantly moving among the students) and Instruction (replacing a passive teach-teach-teach-teach-practice format with an active learn-use-learn-use-learn-use one, giving instruction visually instead of audibly, and getting helpless handraisers to independence). Anything that cannot be controlled with Classroom Structure is controlled with 2) Limit Setting, which is the section where Dr. Jones won my respect: he studied the body language of effective classroom teachers and broke it down into individual body movements that are described and can be practiced and learned (we did this in the workshop too). Basically, he took the mysterious "meaning business" that good teachers instinctively know how to do and broke it down so the rest of us can learn it. Finally, any behavior that can not be controlled by limit setting is controlled by giving Preferred Activity Time (PAT), which uses the idea of Preferred Activities such as games to motivate kids who currently have no instrinsic motivation for learning the material.

Here's my one-sentence overview of the book: Tools for Teaching brings a thousand should-be-obvious "Duh!"s to the front of your mind.

What I got out of this book was no ground-breaking thoughts that expanded my mind, or new insights that made me go "Wow! I would never have believed it!" Instead, my reading and re-reading of the book is constantly accompanied by this mental train of thought: "Ow!....Ouch....Zing! So true! But what can I....oh. Oh, duh. Wow, this is obvious - why didn't I think of this?.......Hmm, I'm not sure about this...oh. Yeah, I guess so. Doh....Ouch! I say that all the time! But what else can....oh. Huh. Doh."

I've just changed the format of this post to the first of many, because I really can't do justice to the book in one sitting. But for right now, here are my reservations and the adjustments I plan to try in the coming year:

1) FJ seems, from his writing and workshop, to believe that groupwork is overused and preferred individual or pair work. I'm not sure, but it seems that way. I definitely believe in groupwork (and I'm also *required* to use groups by my school!) which means that I can't use part of his Responsibility Training. FJ suggests motivating students towards diligence (hard work) and excellence (good work) (p.104). To do this he suggests using Preferred Activity Time (PAT) in two ways: first, PAT the entire class accumulates to use on fun activities, and second, PAT activities individual students can switch to when they have demonstrated mastery of the day's objectives. In group learning we depend on peer teaching to help all the students so I am not planning on using the individual PAT activities that any student can get to every day. Hopefully this will not cause the whole system to collapse; I'll keep this blog updated on whether this is possible.

2) FJ doesn't seem to like discovery work very much (again, just my impression), preferring direct instruction from the clear-cut directions he gives as examples of good lessons. However, in my student teaching I did not find that his suggestions interfered with my abiity to run discovery activities. Indeed, his suggestions point out ways to avoid the BAD "discovery learning" that people can fall into, without clear directions and expectations.

3) FJ's examples focus on procedure, not concepts. Indeed, he uses math for most of his examples and then quotes humanities teachers that say "But Dr. Jones, my subject isn't like math, its about concepts!" AAAAAAAAAAAURGH! It hurts every time I read that. Math is NOT about procedures, it is about concepts, and math is as much (or sometimes more) conceptual than any other subject. Still, I found that I was able to work around this. His examples focused heavily on teaching procedures, like the long division algorithm, but I don't find it very hard to take his underlying philosophy and apply it to teaching concepts. The basics are still useful: be clear in what you want. Use visual aids instead of spoken instructions which are quickly forgotten. Give students a change to use new information immediately, not at the end of a long and boring lecture. Give plenty of practice with the teacher (Guided Practice) before releasing the kids to work on their own (Independent Practice).

4) FJ promotes a more authoritarian view of the teacher than I would like, but once again, I can adjust it to my teaching philosophy. And I have come significantly closer to his POV after student teaching and losing my naive "let's all be nice to each other" hope. My hope is to teach my students that I cannot and will not tell them what to think and believe, but that in my classroom, I can and will set up choices for them about behavior: correct behavior or appropriate consequences.

5) FJ suggests that the time-honored goal of teachers to motivate with content has failed enough to be put aside in favor of other motivators (like PAT). I'm not quite ready to give that up and I hope to God I never will be - when I cease to hope for instrintic motivation, I hope I'll leave the classroom. Still, what eventually won me over was the fact that I don't have to choose. I will run both "motivation systems" side by side - institute PAT time to get reluctant students on board, and then use their attention to try and capture as many of their minds and hearts with math as possible.

Well, this is too long already. But my basic recommendation is this: Read the book, over and over. Take what you can from it, and what is antithetical to your teaching philosophy can be adjusted or discarded. But for any struggling teacher, especially new ones, READ IT. Its NOT a dry read either - FJ has a great dry sense of humor and you find yourself laughing out loud (at yourself, goodnaturedly) constantly. His son's cartoons are also right on the dot. Its funny, eye-opening, doh!-inspiring, and useful. I couldn't use all his suggestion during my student teaching, but what I did use made my job much, much more enjoyable. Hope it does the same for you!

(In my next post I will also include a review of www.fredjones.com)

[ETA: added pretty screen shot]

Desk and Group Labels

Right now I'm focusing on how to set up my classroom. I have to use the department's quizzes/tests, homework assignments, and syllabus, and teach the state standards of course, but as far as I can tell those are my only limitations.

A few weeks ago I got excited at an idea that finally came together. I plan to use the idea of Preferred Activity Time (PAT) Fred Jones describes in his book "Tools for Teaching", and I'm toying with the idea of dividing up the classroom into two teams for the entire semester. Then every Friday as we play math football, or math volleyball, or math Jeopardy, etc., they will always be playing for the same team. The advantage of making the teams semi-permanent, as far as I can see, are:

1) All students in the same group (desks in groups of 4, or maybe 5) will be on the same team, so I'm going to use competition to give them an extra incentive to help their groupmates.
2) Alternate groups are going to be from opposite teams, so if I choose to do so I can have them exchange hw, etc., and give them an incentive NOT to give the other student free points.

The downside is that its really important the teams be about equal in strength, or one team will always win and that will take the incentive away completely. I'm going to be giving mini-assessments the first week to see where they are, and I'll try to balance it as much as I can. I think that what I’ll end up doing is assigning semi-permanent teams, but warning the kids that I might have to shuffle people around once in a while.

So. Here’s my great idea (its not really great unless you think of it at 1am!) I needed a way to label students that would give them a seat label and a group label, but also a “complimentary group” that they might be asked to switch papers with, etc. I finally resolved this by getting the idea of using shapes for one of the labels. I hate making things more than once so I typed up my ideas, and you can access it by downloading the file Desk_Labels in Word or PDF form on the Sines of Learning Document Page.

Instructions for Desk (and Group Station) Labels

Desks are set up in groups of 4, going in circle around room to form 8 sets. Students above 32 are added to existing groups.

The 8 groups are red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, red, and blue.
The first two groups are circles, the second pair squares, the third pair triangles, and the fourth pair diamonds.

I know it sounds confusing, so that’s why I’m going to print out 2 copies of Desk_Labels.doc page 2:



The first page I’ll color the shapes red, the second page I’ll color blue (leaving the circular space around the number white). These will be taped to either the students’ desks or on their seat backs (where Fred Jones suggests they are least likely to get peeled away) so that at all times students know their team (red or blue), their group (Red Circle, Blue Diamond, etc.) and their seat number (1-5).

Pages 3-6 contain labels for whiteboards or anywhere else you want to place stations so that one student per group can be selected out. I'll print out 2 copies of each, color one of each shape red and the other blue, and hang them to designate group stations:



I plan to cut these out, paste them on black construction paper, and use them to designate 8 spaces along my whiteboards so I can say, for instance “All number 3s to the board!” while the other students work at their seats. These can also be used to identify any other group materials, like group manipulative sets or group TI-Navigator hubs.

It sounds a little complex, but it’s complex for me, not the students – they’ve got everything they need to know taped to their desk, and don’t need any explanation other than the Red vs. Blue teams.

Any comments? Suggestions? I would appreciate any and all feedback.

[ETA: pretty screen shots instead of rambling descriptions]