Group items tagged

"For Vi Hart, her mind pondered the mathematical implications. "There's a packing puzzle here," she said. "This is the kind of thing where if you're accustomed to thinking about these problems, you see them in everything." Mathematicians over the centuries have thought long and deep about how tightly things, like piles of oranges, can be packed within a given amount of space. "Here we've got even another layer," Ms. Hart said, "where you're allowed to overhang off the edge of your square. So now you have a new puzzle, where maybe you want the big things near the edge because you can fit more of them off the edge before they fall off." Ms. Hart - her given name is Victoria, but she has long since dropped the last six letters - has an audacious career ambition: She wants to make math cool. "

Fourteen of us-special education teachers, school psychologists, speech therapists, and other educators-recently spent six hours brainstorming with the goal of producing a starter iPad app catalog for teachers and students in our district, and beyond.

Links to the best

National Geographic Maps: Tools for Adventure is the best everything-map site I have seen. The site was created by the Children's museum of Indianapolis. Maps are presented as the keys to adventure. Students learn to use maps to find their way, share information, look at patterns, and solve problems. There are six excellent interactive games for students to practice putting their math skills to use. Students can explore a pyramid by guiding a robot to hieroglyphs, find sunken treasure, explore Mars, go on an adventure, see GIS in action, and visit Adventure Island. I love the realistic feel of these games, as students explore and guide robots, they get a "live" video feed of where they are navigating. On the National Geographic Maps: Tools for Adventures site, you will find information about the Indianapolis exhibit, how to use maps, related map links, and lesson plans. This is one of those websites that my description just won't do justice to, be sure to check it out!

"When you move an entire district into a digital environment a lot of things change. What doesn't change is the fact that everything revolves around academic achievement."

Interesting view of what's happening online

Interesting. Will something like this work as writing prompts for your students?

6 Traits stuff

essentially a meta site that gathers links to the "most intelligent, provocative, and illuminating news stories, critical reviews, political essays, and commentaries published online." Updated six days a week, the site is divided into three main areas. "Articles of Note," "New Books," and "Essays and Opinion."

"To clear up some of the confusion around these comments and assertions, I went straight to the top: the Department of Education's Director of Education Technology, Karen Cator. Cator parsed the rules of the Childrens Internet Protection Act, and provided guidance for teachers on how to proceed when it comes to interpreting the rules. To that end, here are six surprising rules that educators, administrators, parents and students might not know about website filtering in schools."