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"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.

"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.

If any of these questions seem interesting, you may want to watch listen to the interview.  It reminded me of the Student-led TED Talks I saw at GAHS this spring. * What makes for a good TED talk? * Do you have an example of a TEDster who greatly improved their talk? * What makes for a really bad TED talk? * How do you deal with someone who does not think they need to improve? * Do you think there is a real value to the short-form, "TED Style" talk?

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).

""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?

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

"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.

"My hope is that I'm providing a starting point, not an end point, with each post. I never know for sure if what sparks my own curiosity will kindle a similar fire with readers, but if it does, I want readers to be able to pursue the subject beyond the confines of my short posts and tweets. The history-pics accounts give no impression of even knowing this web of legitimate, varied historical content exists. Given their huge follower counts, this is a missed opportunity-for their readers, and for the historians and archivists who would thrill to larger audiences for their work." This is why I love "The Vault," and why anyone interested in history should explore its contents every once in a while. I've found great starting points for lessons here. And thinking about it, I know there's a lesson somewhere in this article too. I just don't know exactly what it is yet.

Lesson ideas for this resource @ http://blogs.henrico.k12.va.us/waberry/2014/03/06/tuvalabs-datasets-to-promote-critical-thinking/

""I think competitive character people don't want to be manipulated constantly to do what one individual wants them to do," Popovich said, "It's a great feeling when players get together and do things as a group. Whatever can be done to empower those people."" Applications for classroom and for our job as ITRTs. ...and I just love Popovich.

"How did Gladwell misconstrue it? Aside from not having copied the numbers from the actual paper correctly for his book? He says that there is a perfect correspondence between practice and the level of expertise a person attains. And you can't tell that from the paper. The 10,000 hours is an average of differences. You could have two people in any endeavor and one person took 0 hours and another took 20,000 hours, which is something like what happened with two high jumpers I discuss in the book. One guy put in 20,000 and one put in 0, so there's your average of 10,000 hours, but that tells you nothing about an individual. Now, Gladwell doesn't say there's no such thing as genetic talent. I think other writers are stricter than him. [Matthew Syed's] Bounce is a book that minimizes talent. Gladwell does say elite performers are more talented. One of the things that Ericsson criticizes Gladwell about is to say that 10,000 hours is some kind of rule. The paper just says that these performers by the age of 20, these performers have accumulated 10,000 hours but there's no where that says it's a magical number where that's when they become elite or anything like that. These people, by the time they go into their professional careers, have way more than that. That's just where they were when they're 20 as an average, not even to mention their individual differences."

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.)"

Lesson objective: In this lesson, students use coordinates to compute perimeters of polygons and areas of triangles and rectangles, e.g., using the distance formula. Pretty much all the steps to this lesson are on the website, which also includes a download link with all the materials that you will need. Something to think about if you plan on completing this lesson: When you first pose the problem to the students - Have the students discuss how they could represent the location of the different vertices for the Bermuda triangle. Give the students time to research/explore and find the latitude/longitude on their own rather than giving it to them directly. There are plenty of tools out there that can help the students complete this task, the most common being Google Earth and Google Maps

"In order to help educators integrate technology effectively, we have compiled a list of technology tools focused on learning goals consistent with the CRCD framework. Unlike other lists that promote "cool tools," yet leave teachers wondering about purposeful educational integration, our list is driven by specific learning goals that promote critical-thinking, creativity, collaboration, and community-mindedness. " Great list of resources including sites for web based timelines, publishing writing online, guided research activities, etc.

"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.

I don't know if aerodynamics is a field of study in high school, but this is pretty cool. You could take this video and do something interesting with it in Logger Pro to analyze wingspeed or do something else that I'm not thinking of currently...

I was reading a blog this morning and ran across this link to a search engine for pictures and graphics that let's you search in a variety of ways including creative commons and flickr. It's a little easier to use than searching there for me. Try it and see what you think.

I'm sure this map holds a ton of possibilities that I know I'm not seeing immediately. Here are some things I am thinking: 1. Where is the windiest/least windiest location on earth? Why is that the case? 2. Where would be the ideal place to put a "wind farm?" 3. Let's check out that hurricane that's developing...

"The best long-term strategy I can see for continuously getting better is for the process of improving to be fun. If I want to get better at teaching, it's got to be fun for me to do so, because that's the only way for me to stare down the abyss of my current craptitude and the probability of my own immediate failure. That's going to look different for different people, because we've all got different tastes. I enjoy planning lessons, so I spend a lot of time on that. You like giving feedback, so you spend your time on that and you get great at that. I hate it, so I suck at feedback and am decent at curriculum." Agree completely with this statement. I think this holds true for our students too. The best long term strategy for improvement in school is that kids needs to have fun in the process.