Group items tagged

"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.

I think this is a neat idea. Would be easy to do and could really add a layer of authenticity to what students are doing and working on. Lots of different ways this idea could be used.

"You've seen the tasks. You've read the research. You're basically bought in. But how do you begin? More importantly, how do you introduce students to inquiry driven learning?" h/t Dan Meyer

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.

""What is a teacher? I'll tell you: it isn't someone who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows." ― Paulo Coelho."

"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.

"A study conducted by two Michigan psychologists, for example, reports that middle-school math students asked to anticipate how linear and exponential factors work-before this information was taught-became more curious about the content of the lessons they then proceeded to learn. Even more importantly, the act of venturing predictions prompted them to understand the material more deeply as they engaged in reasoning and sense-making about math instead of mere memorization."

""That's why the goal of school has to be automaticity," my dad concluded. The Sunday morning roads were empty, and we'd nearly made it home. "Take learning your times tables. You've got to know them cold so that you can go on to finding common denominators, or reasoning about algebraic functions, or whatever. You need each task to become automatic before you can move onto the next intellectual step."" Humorous, yet enlightening take on math class, which can be applied to school in general. What is more important for us to teach students so that it becomes more automatic? Should we make facts automatic? Or should we instead focus on skills and thought processes that can be quickly applied to many scenarios in a variety of contexts?

Gives the language learner the ability to read or listen to text with translation only as needed. Also includes videos and songs with lyrics. It creates a wordlist and flashcards so the student can master the new vocab.

"Empower your students to think critically about data, ask meaningful questions, and communicate their conclusions."

"Students asking questions and then exploring the answers. That's something any good teacher lives for. And at the heart of it all is curiosity."

"Google Books: Google Books can be a good research tool for students if they are aware of it and know how to use it. In the video below I provide a short overview of how to use Google Books for research. You can also find screenshots of the process here. "

"This resonates strongly. I shared a lesson with fellow teachers, and realized I had no good way to communicate what actually made the lesson powerful, and how charging in with the usual assumptions of being the explainer in chief could totally ruin it." Couldn't say it any better than this...Personally, this is one of the reasons I've tried to get video of classroom action and student reflections over the past several years for H21. We can write all we want about what makes a lesson powerful, but it's much more obvious and useful when we see it/hear it ourselves.

Student Sample - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1irmtPploYBF8MBC1X9T1Pnis1JrMKN1h8gQdcHbSgB8/edit#slide=id.p

On Monday, Google released a beta version of something they're calling Tour Builder. It doesn't let you create a full-fledged Google Earth tour with all the bells and whistles but it is a very quick and easy way for you and your students to develop a pretty sweet product.

I wonder how doing a generic student's homework for a week might impact teacher/principal views on homework.

"The big problem is not that they think too highly of themselves. Their bigger challenge is conflict negotiation, and they often are unable to think for themselves. The overinvolvement of helicopter parents prevents children from learning how to grapple with disappointments on their own. If parents are navigating every minor situation for their kids, kids never learn to deal with conflict on their own. Helicopter parenting has caused these kids to crash land." Although I'm not a parent, I am a teacher. And this article (especially this annotation speaks to me). Teachers shouldn't have to be the primary individuals that teach children how to think for themselves, grapple with disappointments, and deal with conflict - that should be the parents. But if we build our curriculum and class activities correctly, we can help to teach these characteristics.