If you haven’t heard of Desmos yet, prepare to explore some new horizons. Imagine an online graphing calculator that is intuitive, elegant, and powerful. Not imagine that is only one facet of a greater mathematics learning tool. That’s Desmos. I’ve been working with Desmos’ activity builder creating some new things, translating some of our old manipulatives to a new format, and… Read more →
Two interesting reads: To See Increases in Student Achievement in 1:1/BYOD Classrooms, Teachers Must be Given Curriculum with Technology Activities Baked in, from The Journal asserts that research shows that technology devices in the classroom will not improve student performance unless the technology is inherent in the curriculum — not just an add-on. Success requires “60 percent to 75 percent… Read more →
Today’s classroom goal was to build connections between the volume of a cylinder and its matching cone (same radius and same height) and the analogous prism/pyramid pair. There is a classic demonstration filling a cylinder/cone pair with water or sand. It takes three cones to fill the cylinder. An extensive youtube search shows only two videos of this demonstration: one… Read more →
Socrative… Thanks to MathyCathy for this one. You create a quiz. Students access the quiz online via a web browser or an iPhone/iPad app. The quiz gives immediate feedback as they answer each question, then emails the teacher a nice color-coded spreadsheet with each student’s response. Remind101… send text/email announcements to students/parents without ever sharing your phone number or email…. Read more →
It’s time to cover square roots in preparation for the Pythagorean Theorem. I’ve written before about some of the struggles I have teaching the concept of a square root. I believe that if a concept cannot be briefly defined to a student, then that is a signal that the student does not have the necessary foundation and is likely to… Read more →
This morning several students on campus participated in a panel, answering staff questions about learning styles and classroom environments. We learned a lot. At one point, students were asked about reading and writing in non-Language Arts classes. One of my students described an activity that we do, and he got all the major points. Made me feel good. Here’s the… Read more →
Students can be like quicksilver in the computer lab. You have firewalls in place, you’re observant, but you turn your back for a second and find one of them reading the wikipedia article on the Bloods and the Crips. (True story. But at least he wasn’t editing the article for accuracy.) Symbaloo allows users to create a graphical list of… Read more →
This app by Riley Lark, et. al. is nice for gathering data or engaging students. You visit the app at http://activeprompt.herokuapp.com/ and upload an image. Students visit a link (Symbaloo, anyone?) and place a dot on the image according to your prompt (where will these lines intersect? Which best represents your solution? the prompts are limitless!). Then a teacher link… Read more →
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