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This is a Google Custom Search Engine for the "Math Twitter Blogosphere." Basically, this tool will search numerous blogs from math teachers, coaches, and other other educators from around the world. Type in your content and check out the ideas that appear.

"Too often kids have trouble with word problems. Too often they don't know what to do with two numbers let alone a bunch of numbers. They guess at division when one number is big and one is small. They add when they see two fractions. They multiply because that was how they solved the last word problem. I will also do this with my 8th graders because I suspect they will have trouble too. And this is exactly the kind of trouble we need to get into. Now rather than later. This task gets them thinking about ratios - which is like the most important math thing in all of the math things." This is a short description of how to get your students developing questions for mathematical scenarios. This would be a great activity to work on if you feel like your students are having difficulty deciphering word problems or are stumped when presented with unfamiliar mathematical scenarios.

Possible idea to encourage and celebrate student understanding of numbers/math

"Mathsframe has more than 170 free interactive maths games. All resources are designed, by an experienced KS2 teacher, to help children to visualise numbers, patterns and numerical relationships and to develop their mathematical thinking. New games are added most weeks." Some of these seem more appropriate for elementary school, but there are definitely some that could serve as quick review for our 6th-8th graders. You could have students use these games for several minutes individually in the class, or have students use a Promethean board/slate to interact with the game in front of the class and discuss their reasoning for the answers they select. This could be a great informal feedback tool that would take very little prep time.

Real world math problems. You have to become a member to see solutions, but good problems and scenarios.

"We are math teachers who share what we've learned, cause we don't want our classes to suck the energy from students. Professional development among friends, not just colleagues. Fun! Immediately useful! Interesting!" The Conference Tab on this page contains video archives of previous meetings. Some of the previous meetings include tips and tricks for using Mathalicious and Desmos in your classroom.

"Function Carnival changes that. Students watch a video. They try to graph what they see. Then they play back the video and see how their graphical model would be represented as an animation. Does what they meant to graph about the world actually match the world?" This is an explanation of a new online math tool called "Function Carnival." The link to the tool is in the opening paragraph. Further explanation of the tool can be found here: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=18420

A good explanation of math questioning with blooms taxonomy.

Great math lessons! Lots of ideas!

For math people, this guy is very solid on how you develop the patterns of thought and understanding.

""What's the sine of π/2?" I asked my first-ever trigonometry class. "One!" they replied in unison. "We learned that last year." So I skipped ahead, later to realize that they didn't really know what "sine" even meant. They'd simply memorized that fact. To them, math wasn't a process of logical discovery and thoughtful exploration. It was a call-and-response game. Trigonometry was just a collection of non-rhyming lyrics to the lamest sing-along ever. Some things are worth memorizing--addresses, PINs, your parents' birthdays. The sine of π/2 is not among them. It's a fact that matters only insofar as it connects to other ideas. To learn it in isolation is like learning the sentence "Hamlet kills Claudius" without the faintest idea of who either gentleman is--or, for what matter, of what "kill" means. Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It's a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding."

good description of new to twitter and math people to follow

a great resource for math assessment (both formative and summative)

"When I get a taxi for the 15-minute ride from my office to the airport, I have two choices. I can hail a cab on the street, and pay a metered fare for the 4.6-mile trip. Or I can walk to the local Marriott and pay a fixed fee of $31.50. Truthfully, I'm always a lot happier paying the fixed fee. I'm happier even though it probably costs more in the end. (A congestion-free trip on the meter comes out to about $26.) Sitting in a cab watching the meter tick up wrenches my gut: Every eighth of a mile, there goes another 45 cents-tick ... tick ... tick." ...this provides interesting context for a math problem using linear equations. When is it worth it to pay the fixed fare vs. paying the per 1/8th of a mile rate? You could "3-Act" this scenario pretty easily: -Take a short video of a taxi fare display clicking upwards. Ask students to give you the first questions that come to mind. When the students ask for it, provide them with a photo of the rate schedule on the side of the taxi and your destination address.

"In 1972 Canadian scientists R.W. Sheldon and S.R. Kerr set out to reason out the number of monsters that occupy Loch Ness. Because the creatures are reportedly large and rarely seen, it follows that their numbers must be small. ("It has been suggested from time to time that as the monsters are never caught it must therefore follow that they do not exist. This is both irresponsible and illogical.")" Neat entry point for a math lesson.

I love that blog. Leads me to wonder how big a lake Godzilla would need.

"I guess dragons love gold. In the recent trailers for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (YouTube clip) you can get a glimpse of all the gold Smaug has. Why does a dragon need this much gold? I don't get it. Maybe Smaug doesn't actually like gold but he just wants to keep it away from other people. Whatever his motivation for hoarding, I am going to try to get an estimate for just how much gold is in the Lonely Mountain." Talk about a fun math problem...

I've never been a huge baseball fan, but I do like data. This interactive display shows the total expenditure of every Major League Baseball team (from 1998 out until a few years in the future). Clicking on a team in the top chart will break that expenditure down per player and show what each player makes per year. Just looking at this chart for a few minutes, I've come up with the following questions that could be used in a math class for a problem solving lesson. Some of these questions would also require the students to locate some additional data as well. * Is there a correlation between team expenditure and winning the Championship/making the playoffs/number of wins in a season? * What percent of a team's total expenses do "star players" take up? * Are star player's "worth it" for a baseball team? * How have team expenses changed over the past 15 years? * Are baseball players being paid more today than in the past or are their salaries just keeping up with inflation? * How much do today's baseball stars make in comparison to the stars of the late 90's and early 00's? Is this difference warranted? I'm sure there are plenty of better questions here that I'm missing.