Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Solving a math problem means unfolding a mystery, enjoying the pleasure of discovery. But in every geometry lesson that year, I blundered along and blurted out the secret. With a few sentences, I'd manage to ruin the puzzle, ending the feast before it began, as definitively as if I'd spat in my students' soup. Math is a story, and I was giving my kids spoilers." This post speaks directly to math, but can be applied to any content. When we provide students with the answers rather than developing lessons that let the students ask (and answer questions), we take the fun out of learning.

"I guess dragons love gold. In the recent trailers for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (YouTube clip) you can get a glimpse of all the gold Smaug has. Why does a dragon need this much gold? I don't get it. Maybe Smaug doesn't actually like gold but he just wants to keep it away from other people. Whatever his motivation for hoarding, I am going to try to get an estimate for just how much gold is in the Lonely Mountain." Talk about a fun math problem...

"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.

""What's the sine of π/2?" I asked my first-ever trigonometry class. "One!" they replied in unison. "We learned that last year." So I skipped ahead, later to realize that they didn't really know what "sine" even meant. They'd simply memorized that fact. To them, math wasn't a process of logical discovery and thoughtful exploration. It was a call-and-response game. Trigonometry was just a collection of non-rhyming lyrics to the lamest sing-along ever. Some things are worth memorizing--addresses, PINs, your parents' birthdays. The sine of π/2 is not among them. It's a fact that matters only insofar as it connects to other ideas. To learn it in isolation is like learning the sentence "Hamlet kills Claudius" without the faintest idea of who either gentleman is--or, for what matter, of what "kill" means. Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It's a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding."

I wonder what kind of interactive images we might make as ITRTs as part of history content.

This article makes me rethink my current profession entirely. I wonder how much I can charge people to help them reset their passwords... In all seriousness, I think this is the wrong article? :)

Weird. That pulled from another tab. Should have been Lincoln post. The pencil thing would make for an interesting math problem.

My children are feral but I'm working on taking them to the next level. I do wonder if it's less about wilderness per se and more about real experiences. You could probably do many things in the city/suburbs that would engage kids in a similar way.

I agree. "We foster and reward a narrow set of skills."

"Since demolishing 78 traffic signals and installing 80 roundabouts, the northern Indiana city of Carmel has reduced the number of accidents by 40 percent and the number of accidents with injuries by 78 percent." There's a great lesson in here somewhere. I'm not sure of the exact structure for it, but here are some of my random thoughts. Let me know if you have others: Use Googlemaps and GoogleEarth in order to determine how many traffic lights are in a specific location in a county/city. Using the calculations in this article/video, how much could the county/city that you researched in Google maps have saved if they installed traffic circles rather than traffic lights. Extension - Research the number of accidents and injury/fatality stats for the area that you've researched. Using the calculations in this video/article, how many lives would traffic circles save in this area?

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