Group items tagged

"Set up a surprise, such that resolution of that becomes the lesson that you intended. Anything that makes students ask the question that you plan to answer in the lesson is good, because answering questions that haven't been asked is inherently uninteresting." This article discusses how to create lessons that provoke student interest and prime them for your lesson. We all know that it is important to have a good introduction or a "hook" for a lesson, but this concept goes one step further. A hook that provides too much information leads to waning engagement. The goal is not just to get the student interested, but to make them curious and ask questions that we plan to answer on that day. Although this particular blog post and the examples within are math related, this technique can be implented in any content area.

This is the Newest webtool developed by Dan Meyer and Dave Major. Dan Meyer discusses the tool and task in a post on his blog here - http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17503 I think this tool would be very engaging for students. Give them the task of finding the quickest route, and they will go nuts with it. I see two main applications for this particular tool/task: You could use this tool as an introduction to angles. Put it on the board, give the kids the task, and have them discuss how they would tell the ship captain to navigate around the buoys. When non-mathematical language and vocabulary bogs down the ship's progress, overlay a grid/protractor and introduce the idea of angles. Have the kids play around with the tool to come up with the quickest route. Discuss the result of small differences in angle measurement on the ship's progress (each degree above the necessary increases the amount of time lost). This could lead into a discussion on the importance of precision… This would be an easy task to make over if you wanted to talk about slope and writing equations of lines (Algebra I). You could overlay a grid on the board, The kids could draw the lines in to get the ships around the buoys, write the equations, then you could talk about how cumbersome the equations are and how ships are actually piloted and bring in the idea of degrees/vectors (direction and angle). Not only does this tool help to teach angles/vectors, but it's also a tool to get students estimating (angles AND distance).

Pretty direct match to what we're working towards in k12.

This seems like a decent interactive for an introduction to atoms/elements/period table. Have the students click through several atoms in order and then discuss: - What do you notice? - What do you wonder? - Predict what the next atom (or the atom 17 clicks away) will look like. Explain your response.

"These maps, published in 1932 in the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States and available through the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, illustrate how arduous travel was in the country's early history. In 1800, a journey from New York to Chicago would have taken an intrepid traveler roughly six weeks; travel times beyond the Mississippi River aren't even charted. Three decades later, the trip dropped to three weeks in length and by the mid-19th century, the New York-Chicago journey via railroad took two days. And the introduction of regional airlines in the 1920s made it possible to travel 1,000 or more miles in a single day." Possible applications for Westward Expansion

"Confucius famously urged followers to heed the Golden Rule: do to others what you would have them do to you. However, he was also famous for another concept: jen. According to Confucius, a person of jen "brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion." In other words, jen represents our ability to make the world a better place…but also a worse one. In this lesson we'll explore the concept of the jen ratio - the ratio of positive to negative observations in our daily lives - and discuss how it influences the way we experience the world. From violent video games to inspiring hip-hop lyrics, how does the Confucian concept of jen shape our lives?" This seems like a very engaging introduction to ratios. This is a paid resource, but the media for this lesson is free and available to all.