Math Links for Week Ending May 31st, 2013

I was really sad when I saw this. Apparently Google hates math. Go into any Google search and type in "math makes me" and watch the suggestions that come up in the autofill. This does not happen in Bing! It did also seem like you got slightly different results in different browsers.
Curriculum Tags: All

Some Sketchpad files that were brought to my attention this week. The first one is a nice one that deals with Venn diagrams. Some clever stuff going on behind the scenes here to make this work. Thanks to Inaam Alsalman for this one.

http://sketchexchange.keypress.com/sketch/view/513/set-puzzles
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U




I really like this one on balancing equations. Its great for those just starting as it re enforces the idea of what you do to one side you do to another. I also like the fact that there is a blank scale so you can create your own puzzles. Thanks to Laurie Hannan for this one.
http://sketchexchange.keypress.com/sketch/view/47/balancing-with-balloons-solving-equations-with-negatives
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P


Just about every platform has a version of Jeopardy. Why not Sketchpad? In this one all the questions are about area. My only criticism for this one is that the answers are written in terms of pi for the circle questions. Some students may have a problem with this. But I do like that it randomly generates questions. Thanks to Lori Abkarian for this one.
http://sketchexchange.keypress.com/sketch/view/179/area-jeopardy-game-updated
Curriculum Tags: Gr8


This one does a good job of generating trinomials that need to be factored using algebra tiles (even ones with negatives). However, I strongly suggest you watch the introductory movie to show how to play the game first. Thanks to Michael Harrington for this one
http://sketchexchange.keypress.com/sketch/view/479/factoring-games,-part-one
http://sketchexchange.keypress.com/sketch/view/480/factoring-games,-part-two
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P

One of the students taking an additional math teacher qualifications course I am teaching made this video with Educreations on the iPad. I was pretty impressed with the way it looks. Clearly this is a good tool if you are looking at ways to Flip your classroom. Thanks to Kristin Gomes for this one.
http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/trig-ratios/7622944/
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P

Many of you may have seen this proof before but its a nice visual way to show that the Pythagoren Theorem works without the use of words. Thanks to Sothea Ly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRXfc5OZqm0
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P, MPM2D, MFM2P

Math links for Week Ending May 24th, 2013

New twitter feeds I'm following @Whatifnumbers and @WolframFunFacts. What if Numbers is the twitter feed of the blog What if where they take a way out concept and do the physics based on it. The feed is all the numbers that he discovers along the way of creating each post. Some neat stuff. The Wolfram Fun Facts are tweets strictly about interesting searches on Wolfram Alpha. For example check out this one about how many times the characters show up in Antony and Cleopatra.
https://twitter.com/WolframFunFacts
https://twitter.com/whatifnumbers
Curriculum Tags: All

The idea of comment only grading is something that Dylan Wiliam talks about. It is very intriguing as a lot of the research seems to suggest that you get the most gains in student performance from comments
rather than grades. John Schammel does a good job of reminding us of this practice with this blog post.
http://thescamdog.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/comment-only-marking/
Curriculum Tags: All

A tricky combinatorics problem. How many ways can 8 horses cross the finish line if you include ties. The thing that makes this tricky is that ties are included.
One thing I like about this post is the idea of first trying a simpler problem
http://samjshah.com/2013/05/14/an-animal-problem/
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U


Need some multiplication practice for your students. There are many online games out there. Try this one out. I dare you to do so on the Impossible level. Thanks to Mark Esping for this one
http://www.imathgame.com/ChromeMultiplication.php
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8

Need some big numbers about the fast food industry? Try this video from the YouTube channel The Infographics Show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVFGpg17hw
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MDM4U

You can never have enough infographics. This one actually takes famous movie quotes and turns them into graphics. 

http://flowingdata.com/2010/03/08/data-underload-12-famous-movie-quotes/

Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MDM4U, MBF3C

Math Links for Week Ending May 17th, 2013

MATH CAMP 2013 has been announced for this year. Though I think the format has changed. For one its not called MATH CAMPPP anymore. This year the focus is on creation of better facilitators. Let me back track a bit first. Math Camp is for K-12 teachers of mathematics. They come together for 5 days of intense immersion into a chosen mathematics topic and leave totally drained having had an intense but rewarding experience and bringing with them tonnes of resources ready to go for the classroom (here are the past years of resources). Usually there is a curriculum theme for each year. However, this year the theme seems to be revolving around facilitators. So if you give PD (or want to give PD) in mathematics in Ontario then this all expense paid activity is for you. Here is the sign up form. Space is very limited so sign up early to ensure a spot.
Curriculum Tags: All

I really like this video. Sure its one of those list videos but when you are doing a unit that involves measurement conversion then I think it would be interesting for kids to know that their are some pretty odd units out there. Who knew that a pinch was an actual measurement.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8qQolqkTU0
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MFM2P

Last week I posted a video of Dan Meyer talking about how to use his 3Act math tasks. That was Act 1. This week Dan has posted videos for Act 2 and Act 3. All great resources for implementing these great activities in your classes.
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17006
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=17024
Curriculum Tags: All

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Math For Grown Ups has a nice post a
bout how the FBI uses math to profile suspects in acts of this nature. There is not a lot of specific info here but it is good to remind kids that math is important in a lot of ways that may not be obvious
http://www.mathforgrownups.com/boston-marathon-how-fbi-profilers-use-math/
Curriculum Tags: All

I like this review of online videos on confidence intervals. These are actually pretty hard to explain (). But here are some examples of good (a few) and bad (a lot) of these vids. The one below is my favourite
http://learnandteachstatistics.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/youtubevideos/
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U

You can't vote anymore but you can see who the winners were in this contest for students to come up with the best video about mathematics. There is some good stuff here. I think just about any school could do the same sort of thing within their building and it would be a good way to promote mathematics in a fun and engaging way. Below is the winner but you can see them all here:

http://www.math-o-vision.com/

Curriculum Tags: All

Belated but still always good with the graphs. I think seeing these types of videos is good for elementary students to inspire them to create interesting graphs when doing their data management units.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKAFS_L9o9I
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8

Math Links for Week Ending May 10th, 2013

Right out of the gate, a great post from Dan Meyer. He has been showering us with 3Act Tasks for years now but now some more detailed info on how to actually execute them in class. Read the entire blog post here (including all the great comments, particularly Kate's about what might happen when you try to do one of these):
http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=16470
Curriculum Tags: All

I really liked this "real world" task dealing with speeding tickets given by the police but measured by pilots in the air using hash marks on the roads. I remember as a kid, my dad getting one of these on the 401.
http://MrHonner.com/2013/04/09/calculus-gave-me-a-speeding-ticket/
Curriculum Tags: MCV4U




The first of two posts from the Square Root of Negative One on Trig. Both are activities. This first one is a hand related way to remember trig ratios of special angles. One thing I like about this post (besides the insights) are the links to others that have posted about this so that you can get many perspectives.
http://squarerootofnegativeoneteachmath.blogspot.ca/2013/05/trig-hand.html
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MHF4U



The second is a series of flash card activities that deal with trig ratios and various angles. I like this because with a single set of cards, she has come up with sev
eral ideas of how to implement them in the class (even giving insight as to what might go wrong).
http://squarerootofnegativeoneteachmath.blogspot.ca/practice.html
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MHF4U



Hey? You want some math comics, how about this site that is chock full of them: Weapons of Math Destruction. If there was social commentary of math and education of math, this might be it.
http://www.weaponsofmathdestruction.com/thumbnails.cfm
Curriculum Tags: All

I really liked this article from a math teacher about what its like to have math anxiety. I think that a problem that many of has as math teachers is that most of us probably did well in math and thus have no empathy for someone who struggles. And by not having that perspective we might actually dismiss any issues that kids have as trivial. But read this article and particularly, I like the bullets at the end of the typical kid who can't do math.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/04/math_teacher_explains_math_anxiety_and_defensiveness_it_hurts_to_feel_stupid.html
Curriculum Tags: All

We will round out this week with a neat animation created using oscillating sine waves. Nice application of trig functions
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MHF4U
http://gizmodo.com/this-animation-based-on-oscillating-sine-waves-is-utter-493970700

OSCILLATE from Daniel Sierra on Vimeo.

Math Links for Week Ending May 3rd, 2013

Unfortunately I have got too much going on this week to post the pile of links I have. This means next weeks post will be long. I had to go head to head with Dan Meyer at this week at the OAME 2013 conference. He won handily, however. Though, as I told him, I got the last laugh. All I did during my workshop was complain about how "Dan Meyer is Everywhere" :-) Anyway, if you want you can take see that my workshop was actually about using Geometer's Sketchpad for functions. Note that the sketch I used is not complete as we did the completion in the session. Sorry. I guess you had to be there.
https://sites.google.com/site/petropresentations/home/oame2013---think-gsp
Curriculum Tags: MCR3U, MCF3M, MBF3C, MHF4U, MCV4U

In my session I used an old page of mine that collected a bunch of images of quadratics

https://sites.google.com/site/wecdsbdi/quadratic-equations/quadratic-images
Curriculum Tags: MFM2P, MPM2D, MCR3U, MCF3M, MBF3C, MAP4C

I also used some of my video collection. Here is my quadratics YouTube playlist
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB38F9FE235438B5D
And a separate page on quadratics that aren't from YouTube (it even has a Dan Meyer video- curses!)
https://sites.google.com/site/wecdsbdi/numeracy-support/grade-10-applied-math-resources/unit-5-intro-to-quadratics/quadratic-videos
Curriculum Tags: MFM2P, MPM2D, MCR3U, MCF3M, MBF3C, MAP4C
Here's the video that goes with the image above