HCPS ITRT

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...

"Teachers: A Simple (Not Easy) Pedagogy Assessment" A lot of these questions could lead to interesting discussions with teachers.

Guidelines for Groupwork. Provides an interesting list of group roles that could be adapted for classroom use.

"If teachers don't have enough time to ask, answer, reflect on, and revise their thoughts about the questions above, then we shouldn't be filling their time with things other people get paid to do, like writing curriculum, writing fancy-schmancy benchmark tests, looking at data that's not useful on the individual student level, or discussing which minutes of the day the bathrooms will be open to students." So many things going on in this article...Personally, I found this statement to be the main standout. I agree with this completely - instruction comes first and all the rest is secondary. If you do a great job with instruction, many of the other time eaters/wasters should fall into place and take care of themselves naturally.

TPACK Resources

Real world math problems. You have to become a member to see solutions, but good problems and scenarios.

"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.

Crowd sourced (by math teachers) list of iPad Apps for math.

Animated .gfis of chemical reactions. Could be fun to make your own :)

"Does the fact that people have helped you, make you feel less accomplished? Does it mean you didn't work as hard on the project, didn't write the book, didn't start the business, or finish the marathon?" To me, this is a testament to the importance of collaboration (collaboration between students, yes…but also collaboration as a staff). The best way to achieve greatness is to share and build off of what others have done before us.

"And yet no one I'm aware of has pointed out one of the more glaring (literally) problems with Jackson's Tolkien films, a problem that has become more evident to me with each installment. It's the choice of his own native land, New Zealand, as the backdrop for these British stories. The island nation of swooping hills and glistening peaks isn't merely an unfortunate choice-it's one of the worst options I can imagine." You could do some really interesting textual analysis stuff like this with comparing book characters and settings with their on screen counterparts. What holds up to the original? What has changed? How does that affect the reader/viewer or change the message of the story? There's plenty of options that students would get into - The Hunger Game Series, The Hobbit, you could even do comic book characters and their on screen counterparts.

Another resource for supporting student reflection.

Quick sheet with samples of three different types of reflective questions for students.

This is a list of teachers, coaches, and educators involved in the Math Twitter Blogosphere. The MTBOS is an extremely active and rich community of individuals looking to improve and refine their own math instruction. This document contains an excellent collection of blogs and twitter handles worth sharing with your math teachers.

Nice visual thesaurus instead of giving me the words. Visual matters

This is a Google Custom Search Engine for the "Math Twitter Blogosphere." Basically, this tool will search numerous blogs from math teachers, coaches, and other other educators from around the world. Type in your content and check out the ideas that appear.

"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.

"Google News is already an awesome tool for finding resources for current events around the world. But if you know where to look, Google News is also great for finding old newspapers for use in your instruction."

"This theory says, "For math to be engaging, it needs to be real. The fake stuff isn't engaging. The real stuff is." This theory argues that the engagingness of the task is directly related to its realness. This is a limited, incomplete theory of engagement. There are loads of "real" tasks that students find boring. (You can find them in your textbook under the heading "Applications.") There are loads of "fake" tasks that students enjoy." I agree completely that there are plenty of REAL tasks that aren't engaging, but in my personal experience as a math student and as a teacher that occasionally creates math lessons, I find the most engaging problems are those that have a real application to my personal interests and life. Personally, I believe that if teachers present "real" tasks to the students that they are passionate about and have fun teaching, that rubs off on the students.

This is another alternative to Socrative or ActivEngage.