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Okay.. it’s taken me since September but this was the first math class of my Grade 9s where I was convinced that they ‘got it’.  Not in terms of the math content; these kids are pretty bright.  But rather in…

I really have to question the continued emphasis on Smartboards… if you’re a teacher (well, high school teacher at least) I’d strongly recommend you consider investing in a good tablet PC and wireless projector.  For the price of the Smartboard,…

So I’ve been playing a bit with Google docs in a few classes…1) Grade 8s. A communal document for review… I distributed review questions to each student and they wrote out the solutions in OneNote and clipped them into our…

MathML Strengthens Digital Math TextsDigital texts are moving beyond simply putting pages on a computer screen.In Kentucky, a small pilot study is demonstrating the benefits of this textbook technology for students with different learning styles. Instead of re-creating a complex…

Well, we’re into quadratics now. The one section is doing really well incorporating Maple into their learning process — they fluidly jump back and forth between Maple & OneNote. The other class more stubbornly holds on to doing everything by…

Well, we’ve used the Curve Fitting Tool for the past couple of classes. Lesson learned: it’s best to be descriptive in your variables because using x and y is not conducive to the CFT (it wants to use x as…

Things that immediately pops up….Having them able to use the TEXT to describe their variables and present their solutions neatly. We focused so much on the math work that I didn’t do enough on using the text component to explain…

Well, we did a bit of direct instruction (not Direct Instruction, which is completely different… kinda like variables in poorly designed programming languages) where, in order to lead them through using Maple to get a least squares line for a…

Okay… well we made an attempt at Maple 12 today… just a brief introduction to graphing. I deliberately did it by assigning names to the equationsL1:=y=3x+2Then I chose to have them graph it implicitly. I’m trying to plan ahead here,…

It begins tomorrow. Well, actually, it doesn’t because the students don’t have their laptops tomorrow so we will just do a “welcome back to school, I’m your teacher, here’s a little activity” without involving any technology. So it will actually…