Group items tagged

"The point here is that the technology made the conversation easier. Instead of creating 20 different examples of graphs and seeing what happens as each variable is changed, students were able to visualize the changes, both in the graph representation, and in the formula representation. When asked if they noticed anything after the "Point on the line" slider was changed, one student said they noticed the Intercept-slope form of the equation did not change. Another student responded to him with "that form of the line doesn't depend on which points you use.""

"And yet no one I'm aware of has pointed out one of the more glaring (literally) problems with Jackson's Tolkien films, a problem that has become more evident to me with each installment. It's the choice of his own native land, New Zealand, as the backdrop for these British stories. The island nation of swooping hills and glistening peaks isn't merely an unfortunate choice-it's one of the worst options I can imagine." You could do some really interesting textual analysis stuff like this with comparing book characters and settings with their on screen counterparts. What holds up to the original? What has changed? How does that affect the reader/viewer or change the message of the story? There's plenty of options that students would get into - The Hunger Game Series, The Hobbit, you could even do comic book characters and their on screen counterparts.

"The GIF below runs through the plates in sequence, from 2348 B.C., "The Deluge" (Quin, not unusually for his time period, was a Biblical literalist) through A.D. 1828, "End of the General Peace."" So my initial thought upon seeing this GIF was that it is eerily similar to the "fog of war" effect from Warcraft, Starcraft, and other similar games from my childhood. Based on this idea, you might be able to do something with these maps related to the essential question, "How has expansion changed our perception of the world?" (This is probably not phrased perfectly, but gets to the general idea...) Additionally, this could be an interesting item to analyze when discussing the essential question, "Have we made progress?" Students could make similar Gifs for shorter time periods to show their understanding of change over time.

"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

an emerging resource from one of the leading experts on math education, Jo Boaler, professor at Stanford University. If we want change in terms of math achievement in education, this is a great place to start.

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.

"Press the play button below to watch the war unfold over time. Drag the scrubber or click on the months and years to change the date range. Roll over the circles for more information on each battle. Casualties are defined as killed, wounded, missing and captured." Cool visualization of all Civil War battles. A couple questions that couple be useful when students view this timeline: - Using the available data, explain the Union strategy during the war - Using the available data, explain the Confederate strategy during the war. - Using the available data, explain what event/series of events represents the turning point of the war.

Wow. Just wow. A lot of potential application here for a variety of topics. - My World History teachers are about to do a Socratic seminar on Rome. The topic is "Haves vs. Have Nots." This map fits perfectly into this discussion. - Use as a tool to discuss reasons for immigration/emigration - Locate the most/least poor areas of the US? Why do you believe this is the case? -Does geography impact poverty? How/Why? - Compare this map to other poverty maps from the past, specifically during the period of industrialization. Discuss how/why things have changed.

"Here you will find one of the greatest historical atlases: Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright's Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States, first published in 1932. This digital edition reproduces all of the atlas's nearly 700 maps. Many of these beautiful maps are enhanced here in ways impossible in print, animated to show change over time or made clickable to view the underlying data-remarkable maps produced eight decades ago with the functionality of the twenty-first century." Large Database of Interactive historical maps

Interesting article that I'm going to share with my English teachers. If they are interested, I'm going to look for/recommend similar functioning tools that they could use with their students. "Instructors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have been using a program called E-Rater in this fashion since 2009, and they've observed a striking change in student behavior as a result. Andrew Klobucar, associate professor of humanities at NJIT, notes that students almost universally resist going back over material they've written. But, Klobucar told Inside Higher Ed reporter Scott Jaschik, his students are willing to revise their essays, even multiple times, when their work is being reviewed by a computer and not by a human teacher. They end up writing nearly three times as many words in the course of revising as students who are not offered the services of E-Rater, and the quality of their writing improves as a result. Crucially, says Klobucar, students who feel that handing in successive drafts to an instructor wielding a red pen is "corrective, even punitive" do not seem to feel rebuked by similar feedback from a computer."

Amazing how a remix can completely change your perception of a story. There's an English lesson here somewhere.

"25 Things Influential People Do Better Than Anyone Else"

""What will be your fingerprint on this school after you leave?""

"This site lets you use a Bookworm database to read Obama's State of the Union in the context of all the other State of the Union messages given by American presidents. For any word in the message, just click on the text: the word will turn red. If you want to search a two-word phrase, just highlight both words. (You can't search for phrases longer than two words)."