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 terms of how one learns math, how they collaborate, share, discuss, conjecture, disagree, check, etc. […]
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, you could likely pick up a couple more tablets or a lot more netbooks and […]
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 Google Doc for everyone to see. I used the comment tool to mark it up. […]
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 math problem as a static image file, digital texts that use math markup language, or […]
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 hand/calculator. I keep struggling to move this section to a more exploratory model but they […]
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 the regression variable).We’re on to quadratics now; I wish the spreadsheet tool was a little […]
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 the setup and solution. Sigh…. only so many hours in a class is one excuse, […]
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 set of data, I had to go through with them step-by-step. For one, I didn’t […]
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, so that I can use the names of the equations when they start to solve […]
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 start on Tuesday. I’m hoping to get the permission forms approved by admin by then […]