If you like quiz apps and control then you probably already know about KnowledgeHook. One nice thing about KnowledgeHook is that it has a lot of ties to Ontario curriculum but their new feature is icing on the cake. Now when you create your questions for students you can make virtual manipulatives available to them to use.
Curriculum Tags: All https://support.knowledgehook.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000394466
There is a growing number of teachers who are spiraling their courses here in Ontario, and if you think you might want to try it you are lucky to have teachers who share their whole process. And although @MrOrr_Geek created this post "to remind my future self on what I did this semester", for any one teaching MHF4U, it is a great resource for spiralling that course. I particularly like the reverence to how homework is taken up. Have a look
Curriculum Tags: All http://mrorr-isageek.com/spiralling-in-advanced-functions-mhf4u/
If this blog is anything, its a testament to the fact that I think sharing ideas is one of the best things that we can do. So I liked what @MaryBourassa has done that with her department each week. She took one thing that teachers could take with them and add to their classes and highlighted it with a short email. You can get the full Google Doc here (note that Ontario Math Links is there - does that mean we have an endless loop of sharing?). Read on below for more info.
Curriculum Tags: All http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2017/01/math-minute.html
Some great examples of how you can incorporate math into programming with Scratch from @MrHonner. Check out all the examples and start coding with your classes.
Curriculum Tags: All http://mrhonner.com/archives/17452
"When we make mistakes like this, what matters is how we show our students how WE handle mistakes." - that was the point that most resonated with me in @MarkChubb3's post on lessons learned from making mistakes. The reason that this resonated with me was that it is my belief that when students see us teach flawlessly, it gives the a false sense of reality. That is, they only see perfect (or near perfect) work from us and thus when they make mistakes they either a) feel bad because all they ever see is no mistakes or b) not know what to do when they encounter a mistake because they have never seen what we do (or both). So I think we have to embrace mistakes (and maybe even manufacture them) so they can see what we do when it happens to us. Read on for more insight on mistakes.
Curriculum Tags: All https://buildingmathematicians.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/lessons-learned-from-3-mistakes/
Today was the first "permutation" day of the year. A day when you can re arrange the digits of the day and the month to make the year. When will the next one be?
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U http://mrhonner.com/archives/17472
I like this post from @marybourassa with a few tips. The importance of choosing students randomly and why even struggling students need to be given challenging problems, review day tweaks and using stickers. These are really simple things to do in class that increase student thinking. It's really worth the read.
Curriculum Tags: All http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2017/01/little-things.html
And for those of you spiralling grade 10 academic, @Marybourassa has posted some updates on the semesters work. And if you have never spiralled that course then check out the link to her series of day-by-day posts which has all the goods.
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D http://marybourassa.blogspot.ca/2017/01/spiralled-mpm2d-update.html
I like this simple activity of using playing cards to have kids work with mean, median and mode. The activity itself is nice but the discussion that follows when @msbjacobs talks about what happened when he gave the students an unsolvable question. I think this kind of thing is really important for students to see. Mistakes, that is. Sometimes I feel like when all we present is perfect work, students a) get the feeling that somehow they are inadequate because they aren't and b) then never see strategies for dealing with mathematical problems.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8 http://themathguy.blogspot.ca/2017/01/the-best-laid-plansoften-go-awry.html
Taking simple problems and tweaking them so that they require much deeper thinking is a great idea. That's what @RobertKaplinsky tackles in this post. From addition and subtraction questions to exponents, trig and roots. All done by giving students the choice of filling in numbers. He gives you steps to change your own simple problems to increase their depth of knowledge (DOK)
Curriculum Tags: All http://robertkaplinsky.com/3steps/
A couple from @Desmos. The first would be great to deal with introducing the idea of rate of change as it connects to slope. It uses some of the special Desmos tools only available to them but add a lot to the experience with students.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM2P http://blog.desmos.com/post/155493373922/friday-fave-for-january-6
The second one is for dealing with systems of equations. I like the fact that it starts with some review of the conceptual nature of what a solution is with simple equations and then transfers that to what it means to solve a system of equations.
Curriculum Tags: MPM2D, MFM2P http://blog.desmos.com/post/155825958132/friday-fave-for-january-13
A conversation with @MathGarden and @JamesTanton via @buzzmath. I really like the bit about slowing down the thinking process where James talks about giving assignments that he would refuse to accept until they were done perfectly. There is also some fun math so watch the whole thing.
Curriculum Tags: All https://blog.buzzmath.com/2017/01/19/sunil-singh-and-james-tanton-talk-about-teaching-math-video/
When someone you know has a YouTube video with almost 10 million views and that video is related to math, well, you can't ignore it. The story that @slamdunkmath tells about the video is actually a pretty cool read. Check it out (but not until after you watch the video.
Curriculum Tags: All http://slamdunkmath.blogspot.ca/2017/01/15-minutes.html
I'm a sucker for a good data set, especially if someone else finds it. In this case it was @Wheeler_Laura who found a nice data set connecting flight length and cost. A great data set if you are looking at linear relations. Check out all of her activity resources at the link below.
Curriculum Tags: MPM1D, MFM1P, MFM2P, MDM4U, MAP4C https://mslwheeler.wordpress.com/2017/01/07/flight-costs-mfm2p/
I'm working on a new sorting activity for solving equations that involves equations written as strips to show the equality of the sides. To help I created this dynamic sketch to make the strips given any simple equation in the form ax + b = c in its various forms (with natural numbered coefficients). Once you input the coefficients then you can take a screenshot of the representation you want (there are four versions of the representation.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MFM1P, MFM2P http://engaging-math.blogspot.ca/p/web-sketches.html
There is a lot of great math that goes into why airlines overbook fights and it has a lot to do with the normal distribution and expected value. Don't forget to get all the lesson extras on the TED-Ed site. Thanks to David Broad for this one.
Curriculum Tags: MDM4U http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-airlines-sell-too-many-tickets-nina-klietsch
I have always loved the story of Eratosthenes and how he estimated the Earth's circumference by just using shadows, angles, parallel lines and a bit of proportions all about 2000 years ago. And now here is a short video from @BI_Video about it. Thanks to @Esping_math for pointing this one out.
Curriculum Tags: Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P http://www.businessinsider.com/how-greek-eratosthenes-calculated-earth-circumference-2016-6
I just came across this online graphing platform that is free for much of the stuff we do in high school math. Specifically statistical stuff in one and two variables. This is a site called Plot.ly and has a paid and free version. The free version is still pretty good with linear and quadratic regression as well as histograms and box plots (with outliers) and even heat maps. You can save your graphs and even embed them into your web pages like I did below (click on the graph and it will take you to the site with the data). I will probably do a more thorough post about this on my Found Data blog but take a look and try it out.
Curriculum Tags: MBF3C, MDM4U, MAP4C https://plot.ly/
Ever buy Lego's by the pound? Well thanks to @rjallain we now have data and analysis to show how much each of those bricks cost. It was this post that introduced me to Plot.ly
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P https://www.wired.com/2016/12/heres-much-lego-brick-stepped-worth/
If you are looking for a super rich data set to show students the power of analyzing data, look no further than the bike share data from NYC. After over 10 million rides there is a wealth of data in all forms. Bar graphs, scatter plots, periodic modelling, dynamic representations and more. Though you can't do much actual data manipulation, you can do a lot with inferring from graphs.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MBF3C, MPM1D, MFM1P, MDM4U, MAP4C http://toddwschneider.com/posts/a-tale-of-twenty-two-million-citi-bikes-analyzing-the-nyc-bike-share-system/
I like card sorts. They are a simple way to have students practice skills in a way that is a bit more fun than a worksheet. This one from @mathequalslove is dealing with inequalities.
Curriculum Tags: MHF4U http://mathequalslove.blogspot.ca/2017/01/inequality-card-sorts.html
I love the title of this post from @benorlin "The Catchy Nonsense of "Two Negatives Make a Positive"". The act of giving students things to memorize instead of helping them understand is a common practice in math classes. But maybe this post will help a bit.
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/12/14/the-catchy-nonsense-of-two-negatives-make-a-positive/
Though I am not a huge fan of their music (it's fine but it just doesn't do much for me) but OK Go have created a cottage industry of awesome video making. Their latest video for their song "The One Moment" uses some super high speed cameras (4000 frames per second) to actually shoot the entire video in a matter of seconds. See it below, then watch the math behind making it work. Lots of rates of change needed here. Watch the music video, then the math bit and then the behind the scenes stuff below
Curriculum Tags: Gr7, Gr8, MPM1D, MFM1P https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/math-with-ok-go/
Thanks to @StandupMaths here are some numerical facts about the number 2017 to ring in the new year. This reminds me that we can have students do a lot of number manipulation around just about any value. Have some of your students verify some of these facts (for fun)
Curriculum Tags: All https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jMU-AwX34
If you like quiz apps and control then you probably already know about KnowledgeHook. One nice thing about KnowledgeHook is that it has a lot of ties to Ontario curriculum but their new feature is icing on the cake. Now when you create your questions for students you can make virtual manipulatives available to them to use.
There is a growing number of teachers who are spiraling their courses here in Ontario, and if you think you might want to try it you are lucky to have teachers who share their whole process. And although @MrOrr_Geek created this post "to remind my future self on what I did this semester ", for any one teaching MHF4U, it is a great resource for spiralling that course. I particularly like the reverence to how homework is taken up. Have a look
If this blog is anything, its a testament to the fact that I think sharing ideas is one of the best things that we can do. So I liked what @MaryBourassa has done that with her department each week. She took one thing that teachers could take with them and add to their classes and highlighted it with a short email. You can get the full Google Doc here (note that Ontario Math Links is there - does that mean we have an endless loop of sharing?). Read on below for more info.
Some great examples of how you can incorporate math into programming with Scratch from @MrHonner. Check out all the examples and start coding with your classes.
