Get the Math has been around for a couple of years but when it first came out it only had a few activities. Not sure how I cam across it again but I see that it has expanded its content. The premiss is that it would highlight a real context that math was used and then build an interactive activity around it. So far they have fashion, music, video games, basketball, restaurants and special effects. With topics like ratio and rate, percents, plotting points, linear relations, quadratics and exponential relationships. Personally my favourite is the music activity with ratios and sampled beats. Very cool. Below is the intro video for that activity
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MFM2P, MPM2D, MCR3U, MCF3M, MBF3C, MAP4C, MCT4C http://www.thirteen.org/get-the-math/
I have mixed feelings about the whole effort to make tutorial videos about doing math. Not so much about whether they are a good idea but more about the quality of what is out there. There are certainly large repositories (the Khan Academy) but its navigating those videos can be a problem. Phoenix College has tried to address that with this simple interface. Start with a topic and then that is further broken down into sub topics until you find the video you want. Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers for turning me on to this one. http://www.phoenixcollege.edu/academics/programs/mathematics/math-videos
Curriculum Tags: All
I like this simple experiment. Next time it snows (hopefully not soon), fill up a glas with it and estimate the amount of water when it melts. You could create all sorts of data when doing this and then use that to connect snow fall with regular precipitation. http://emergentmath.com/2013/04/16/snow-cylinder/
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MFM1P, MPM1D
Apparently the portion of the brain that is in charge of doing math is
localized to one area. At least that is what it seems a new research paper is saying. Read more here. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one. http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/23/your-brain-on-math/
Curriculum Tags: All
How do you show a graph when you are on the radio? You convert it to music and have an opera singer sing it of course. I have just been getting caught up on some of my older podcasts and heard this great piece by Planet Money. Rather than just describe the graph seen on the right, they converted it to music and had it sung. Perfect for showing that data can be represented in many ways. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/04/27/135737940/the-case-shiller-index-sung-as-opera
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MDM4U, MAP4C
Is
the Body Mass Index (BMI) really that useful if it says people like
Brad Pitt are considered overweight? In fact, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson
is actually obese according to the BMI. Here's another adjusted measure.
This could be used for teaching order of operations in Gr 7 or Gr8.
Just sayin http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21229387
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8
Want to develop the value of Pi using Archimedes Principle of Exhaustion? Who doesn't? You can do it here at the Nova site with a handy dandy interactive applet. While you are there check out their other applets for math and science as well as full episodes of Nova. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/approximating-pi.html
Curriculum Tags: Gr8
Numberphile just released a video post compiling the results from their quest to find YouTube's favourite number. Here is the blog post that gives the detailed results of the data as well as the summary video and original videos. Great for any Data Management class http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/popular-numbers.html
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MAP4C, MDM4U
In the Numberphile post below you may have noticed that there are some limit expressions. These were produced by an online LaTeX equation editor that lets you create equations and then paste HTML code into your web pages (or images into your documents). A useful thing if you have ever needed to put math in a webpage http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php
Curriculum Tags: All
A great video by Numberphile on the problems with dividing by zero and the idea of 00. A nice discussion of and (and others).
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U
Here is a nice image to talk about both bad math and rates http://i.imgur.com/zH6jQlp.jpg
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P
Download this free poster of colour coded trig identities from the Math Four site. A nice visual aid that you could print out for your grade 11 students.
I like this simple experiment. Next time it snows (hopefully not soon), fill up a glas with it and estimate the amount of water when it melts. You could create all sorts of data when doing this and then use that to connect snow fall with regular precipitation.
Apparently the portion of the brain that is in charge of doing math is 
