Modeling

If you haven’t heard of Modeling and you teach math or science, you should check it out.  It’s an awesome curriculum and allows teachers to focus on planning for their students rather than inventing effective lesson plans.  http://modeling.asu.edu/ To access the full curriculum, one has to attend a workshop.

The Hot Tub

Found at: http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/Algebra/hottub.html

The technologies used in this lesson are a word processor, a blog, a microphone, and sound editing software (such as Audacity).

Objectives of the technologies:

• Word processor – Students will use a word processor to compose a brief (less than one page) story following the idea given in the “Another Story…” section of the lesson plan.
• Blog – Students will publish their stories on a class or public blog. This follows the meme of “explain this picture mathematically”. They will publish both their printed and their reading of the story. (This motivates a conversation on the pros and cons of different representations of the story.)
• Microphone – The microphone will be used to capture each student telling their story in front of the class.
• Sound editing software – The students will use Audacity to prepare their story for inclusion on their blog as a podcast.

Software and Hardware requirements:

• computer with enough storage space for a hour or so of uncompressed audio
• web browser
• sound editing software
• microphone
• Internet/Intranet access to the blog

Skills required:

• Teacher – The teacher must be able to troubleshoot audio problems and levels with the student to record the student’s presentation, should be familiar with sound editing, and should know how to upload audio to a blog.
• Students – Students should be familiar with a word processor and know how to use their class/individual blog account.

Reflections on the technology:

The comprehensiveness of the storytelling might be overkill, but it does illustrate an edit cycle of preparing a word processing document for something, rather than an end in itself. The underlying assumption here is that students will enjoy hearing the stories that their peers concoct. The process of creating a story emphasizes thinking deeply about how mathematics is connected to life. To shorten the process, an alternative to formal presentations is to set up a sound booth station in a closet or a corner, but then one cannot ensure that other students will hear the stories.

Multiplying binomials with F.O.I.L.

Found at: http://www.lessonplanspage.com/MathMultiplyingBinomialsWithFOIL812.htm

The technologies used in this lesson are a Wiki, a graphics program (such as Inkscape), and the World Wide Web.

Objectives of the technologies:

• Wiki – The Wiki will be used to present and share the group’s solution to a way to multiply binomials in the expanded discovery phase of the lesson; it should explain in detail to an audience including their classmates how to perform their method. At the end of the creation phase, students will use the Wiki to compare their solutions. Each student will individually choose a method and add to that Wiki page an example of how to use it.
• Graphics program – Inkscape or another program will be used to create illustrations for the Wiki.
• World Wide Web – After completing their project, students will use the World Wide Web to explore other solutions to the project and compare other student’s solutions to existing solutions.

Software and Hardware requirements:

• A class-wide Wiki should be selected—one that can handle mathematics is preferable.
• A graphics program
• Internet access and web browser

Skills required:

• Teacher – The teacher must be facile with the software and hardware above, including how to export images for use on the wiki and how to represent mathematics on the wiki.
• Students – Familiarity with searching and conducting research is essential, as is knowing how to evaluate Internet sources. Familiarity with graphics software is helpful.

Reflections on the technology:

The students will eventually use the Web to evaluate methods for multiplying binomials, but they will first struggle on their own to find their own representations. The culminations of the struggle is their group page on a class Wiki, a tangible form of effort spent. The hardest part for students will probably be not using computers in the discovery phase, as they will simply want to look up an answer and consider it the right answer. Hopefully, the emphasis on comparing their solution to the solutions of other groups in the class and those found on the Internet will require them to think critically and realize that there is no one right answer. Some students might not want or need to use the graphics program, but those students who think visually should have some outlet for their creativity. An alternative for those students who like to draw is using a scanner to digitize a paper drawing.

Education works best when all the parts are working together.

This is a recreation from memory of a poster that I saw when I was in grade school. It was posted just outside my first grade classroom. I often wonder if its creator had intended it to be humorous.

Addendum: This picture was amazingly easy to put together using Inkscape, which I downloaded from fossfor.us.

EERE project

The EERE publishes Energy Savers, a site with tips to save energy. After working in an uncomfortable school with stupid air circulation issues, I thought of a cool project for students: improve your school. Investigate the financial incentives available. Learn to conduct an energy audit by reaching out to local auditors. Perform cost-benefit analyses. Present the results to the school board and school administrators.

Forget high-stakes testing when we can increase student stakes in education.

Wind for Schools

The Kansas branch of Wind for Schools is run by KSU. This is a project-based learning opportunity with all kinds of potential. Unfortunately, to be approved, your school has to have decent wind potential. Contact them for more information and to see if your school qualifies. Because this is interdisciplinary with a fair amount of researched curriculum already developed for it, it helps to have some buy-in from colleagues before writing the grant application. The best part? This project will generate money for your district. I dare any administrator to turn that down.

For more ideas, you might check out KidWind or NEED or NREL (or NREL here ).

Scratch

I am continually impressed by projects from students on the Scratch platform. If you haven’t seen Scratch, check it out. It can be used in English classes as a backdrop to tell stories. I can be used in math classes by using its programming constructs. It can be used in any class for interactive presentations. Check out the galleries for ideas.

Guido van Robot

An homage to Guido van Rossum, Guido van Robot uses a simplified syntax and helper functions to teach students procedural and/or systematic thinking.

Kirby Urner

O’Reilly features one of my math pedagogy heroes, Kirby Urner, in an article “Teaching Math with Python“. Yeah, the article is way old and the links out of date, but you can see what Kirby is up to at Oregon Curriculum Network (OCN), his own project.

600kV from 6 “C” batteries

More striking than this image (from jurvetson’s flickr photostream), in which 6 “C” batteries are used to generate an approximately 600kV mini-lightning strike, is the way that the flickr is used to annotate parts of the image (“notes”) in the original site. I can imagine biology students labeling parts of animals from photos or anatomy students marking up photos of operations. Clearly, it even has use in physics. And jurvetson kindly provides an explanation of how it works with a link to Wikipedia on the Marx generator. At one level, one could consider this an extreme automation because a student could look up Marx generator and find more information about it–nevermind that they wouldn’t. However, this differs from a conventional “check out this cool photo” by the presence of metadata describing information that most students wouldn’t have been able to recognize unless they already knew what a Marx generator was, making this a nice example of information.