MTBoS Love - Estimation 180

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a blog is that I had been an MTBoS consumer for about a year.  It all started last summer at a conference when I was encouraged to live tweet during the event.  I thought the idea was a little silly and I was not really interested in keeping up with the Kardashians.  However, I did learn something that I considered to be tweet worthy.  So I joined and tweeted.  After a few months, I had found about 50 math teachers from around the world that had great ideas.  These teachers were sharing their resources at no cost.  Twitter became my go-to lesson planning resource.

Eventually I started to notice questions on twitter for which I felt I could contribute to the solution.  I tried to reply with 140 characters, but I often wanted to share links.  So, I decided to start a blog.  So far I've blogged about standards based grading and hybrid learning.  This next series of posts will be about my favorite resources for encouraging mathematical discussion and promoting student engagement.  Once school starts I hope to share some materials that I have created as well as use the blog as a place to reflect on student work.

So without further delay, here is my first favorite:  Estimation 180
I use this site with all of my kids 9-12.  We don't really use the site for content but the site is great for developing number sense and allowing all students to participate.  Every student can make a guess, so every student can get involved.  My students like the ones with video solutions best.  It is so cool to watch my kids react during the video.  For example, maybe one student guessed that the reel would hold 25 revolutions worth of Christmas lights.  As the video approached this value the student might yell 'Yes'!  and as the video went past this value the same kid would sign 'ugh'!  This would happen over and over again for each value guessed by each student.  At the end, some students would brag about having the best estimate.  The students that were not close with their guess don't feel bad about themselves because it was just a guess.  The situation is low risk.

Here is the worksheet for recording student guesses and tracking progress.