Group items tagged

"While killing time in the airport last weekend, I watched a series of Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show clips. While watching Jimmy Fallon and Bryan Cranston playing "Word Sneak," I was inspired! I decided to use this game format for a vocabulary review in my class." This sounds like an interesting method to learn/review vocabulary. As an addition to the game, you could give students a specific discussion prompt to focus their talk, and then they could "sneak" the words into this particular conversation.

I actually did this with a class, a variation anyway. Remind me to share the videos with you the next time we are all together.

"There's a contest called Math-O-Vision, which your students should enter. Here's the premise: The Neukom Institute for Computational Science, at Dartmouth College, is offering prizes for high school students who create 4-minute movies that show the world of equations we live in. In 240 seconds, using animation, story-telling, humor, or anything you can think of, show us what you see: the patterns, the abstractions, the patterns within the abstractions." Two interesting things going on in this short blog post: 1. It introduces a contest which might be interesting for some of your students. I looked at the winning video from last year (linked in the post) and know that our students are capable of making something of similar quality. 2. The articles provides an interesting insight on math as a "product." This is quite an interesting discussion when thinking about how/why to assign this type of activity to your students.

"Ever wonder why we are made up of the particular ratio of elements that we happen to be made up of? The answer may be very simple. Perhaps we are that way because the universe is that way." This infographic reminded me of this H21 lesson (http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/21/?s=element+survivor&x=-1067&y=-38) and could provide a neat extension/summary for the lesson. After the students create their products and justify their choices, the teacher could show the infographic on this page and have the students compare and contrast their choices to the infographic and discuss "Why do you believe the human body contains these proportions of the listed elements?" Then, after an appropriate amount of time for the discussion, go for the big reveal and show the graphic that displays the abundance of each element in the universe.

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.

"This map, made with data from the 1870 census, shows rates of wealth per capita in the settled United States. The scale stretches from white-"under $175 per capita"-to dark orange-"$1300 and over." (In today's terms, that range of per capita net worth would be $3,125 to $23,214.29.)" Possible uses when teaching Reconstruction

"So, what's a leader and the school to do? How do we create "checks" to serve as guideposts toward success?  One potential way may be a novel idea in education.  Use teachers and educators that have experienced success in building instructional capacity to be "scouts" for other teachers and schools that are building capacity in a meaningful way.  What I mean by 'scouts' is that these individuals would be charged with working next to teachers and school leaders to develop and refine instructional capacity, but when "it" shows itself in the form of meaningful and intentional classroom instruction or PLCs that really improve student performance, the 'scouts' chronicle this story.  The 'scouts' dual responsibility is to not only share in the building of the capacity, but to also spread the good news when it's been accomplished. In doing so, the profession of teaching and learning, can begin to articulate and share in these guideposts toward meaningful capacity.  What's missing in this dynamic are the 'scouts' that are embedded in several classrooms, schools and districts simultaneously and use this experience to improve the work simultaneously.  What's crucial about this approach is that it isn't 'helicoptered in' and is never something done 'to' teachers.  The work of the 'scout' is to find, develop, and refine great teaching and learning and use this as a way to scale up the work so that more and more students can have access to highly effective teaching and learning. " This article, specifically this annotated section, really spoke to me and made me think about what the two main initiatives of our department - Henrico 21 and Reflective Friends, should look like. It shouldn't be something that is "helicoptered in" or "done to teachers," but instead should be about developing, refining, promoting, and sharing good teaching.

"David Cox sent his students through Function Carnival where they tried to graph the motion of different carnival rides. (Try it!) Every student's initial graph was wrong. No one got it exactly right the first time. But Function Carnival doesn't display a percent score or hint tokens or some kind of Bayesian probability they'll get the next graph right. It just shows students what their graph means for that ride. Then it lets them revise."

"He cites Socrates's parable of the Egyptian god Theuth and how he invented writing, offering it as a gift to the king of Egypt, Thamus, who met the present with defiant indignation: This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

I saw this Dan Meyer TED Talk on re imagining Math through problem solving. I like how he takes a problem from the textbook and makes it more rigorous. "Today's math curriculum is teaching students to expect -- and excel at -- paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. In his talk, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think. (Filmed at TEDxNYED.)"

"This video, taken at the direction of the US Air Force in March 1946 and now held in the National Archives, shows Hiroshima seven months after the bomb, when the city was under U.S. occupation and in the process of rebuilding."

This seems like a fun and interesting way to discuss/learn several different math topics. Here's a sample lesson plan that popped into my head when I saw this post: 1. Show to students a GoogleMap/GoogleEarth image similar to the one on the website, but more meaningful to you/them. For example, several different grocery stores around your house. 2. Ask the students, "Which one should I go to?" Have the students justify their answers using the image and mathematical topics that they have learned up to this point. 3. With appropriate questioning you could work in several mathematical topics here (I know I'm missing others as well…) a. Overlay a grid on the GoogleMaps and have the students give each of the locations points on an x,y axis. Use this information to determine distance. Have a conversation if this is the best way to determine which location is easiest to access. When students start to bring up the fact that even though some points are technically closer, but could be slower to get to, bring in… b. Rates, ratios, etc. Discuss how fast you could possibly travel on each route according to number of stop signs, streetlights, speed limit etc. Have students use this information to calculate the appropriate answer.

"Just a quick post- we started a unit on percents today.  Found this activity from Illuminations, but I needed it to be a little bit more.  The activity takes the BMIs and weights of season 14′s contestants and students need to find the percent lost for each in order to find out who won the game.  We then had a discussion on why the show does not award the prize to the person with the most weight lost, but the highest percentage." You could find some good video/media to go along with this to hook students - Maybe a before/after picture video which I'm sure you could find online. Have the students use the video to predict the winner then get into the worksheet. There are some pretty good extension activities embedded here as well: Research how BMI is calculated, Determine whether percentage of weight lost is the best method to determine the winner, etc.

"The following digital tools show promise to support word learning, review, and play with language. I've grouped them into four categories: Reference Tools, Word Clouds, Games and Review, Word Walls and Virtual Field Trips. "

A friend shared this with me and it's a good read. It also summarizes the way that many of our teachers think, and could be an interesting article to share with a teacher and have a discussion about. Ultimate, I have a huge problem with the assumptions and conclusions that are being made here: "Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal. Studies have now shown, among other things, the benefits of moderate childhood stress; how praise kills kids' self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success than SAT scores. All of which flies in the face of the kinder, gentler philosophy that has dominated American education over the past few decades. The conventional wisdom holds that teachers are supposed to tease knowledge out of students, rather than pound it into their heads. Projects and collaborative learning are applauded; traditional methods like lecturing and memorization-derided as "drill and kill"-are frowned upon, dismissed as a surefire way to suck young minds dry of creativity and motivation. But the conventional wisdom is wrong. And the following eight principles-a manifesto if you will, a battle cry inspired by my old teacher and buttressed by new research-explain why." Why are these seen as two completely different and opposing philosophies of education? That's my question. From my experience, teasing knowledge and understanding out of children stresses the hell out of them. They struggle to give you an answer initially, but when when you are unwilling to spoon feed them or provide them with a "drill and kill" answer, they finally make a connection. In doing so you show the students that their grit and determination has helped them gather a better understanding of the material and become a better student and learner in process.

I may write a decent response to this. She plays just about every false argument card in the book. It needs this treatment - http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/10/huntsville_teacher_common_core.html

This take down of Gladwell's dyslexia chapter http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=8123 makes for a similar parallel.

"As brilliant reader John D. asked, how many miles does Mario have to travel before he finally gets to Princess Peach?" This could be a great lesson starter for ratio, proportion, and estimation. Show your students one of the levels, ask them to predict, and then have the students create a process in order to answer the question. Reveal the article after students have made their calculations.

"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.

"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