Mathsational

This is week seven of the Sunday Funday blogging initiative.  It's never too late to join in!  You can read more about the challenge  here  if you like.  This week's challenge is to write about our favorite lesson.  I have a hard time picking a favorite lesson, especially one that I have not already blogged about.  I love all of the following: Barbie Zipline - Angle of Elevation Barbie Bungee - Line of Best Fit Logarithm Earthquakes Circle Equation Earthquakes Candy Catapult Quadratics  and Dance Dance Transversal However, I'd like to write about something new.  So today I'm writing about CPM's "How High Will it Bounce?" lesson.  I added some technology to this lesson to connect estimating a line of best fit and using a graphing calculator to find the linear regression line and correlation coefficient.  Here are some screenshots pictures and videos from the lesson. Today in #al...

Since I joined the #MTBoS about three years ago, I have grown more in my teaching than I had in the previous ten years.  Some of that growth came from attendance at conferences but most of the growth was the result of interacting with teachers from around the world on twitter and on blogs.  Here are three blog posts that have had a great impact. Gems 54 - Algebra by Example Jo Morgan posts regularly about great resources she find via twitter and elsewhere online.  I love error analysis and this particular posts introduced me to Algebra by Example .  Sometimes I use these problems as a warm-up, other times I use them at my collaborative station in my hybrid classroom.   I especially like the additional questions about the mistakes.  Sometimes kids need a place to get started and the questions do just that.  I hope that one day this resource will be expanded to include algebra 2 and geometry topics. Graphing Stories Dan Meyer wrote ...

(Since posting originally posting this, Meg made me a star!) I often have preservice teachers visit my classroom.  I’ve worked with college freshmen experiencing their first time in the classroom as an educator and student teachers during their final semester of college as well as everywhere in between. I always feel like I can always do a better job helping these students transition into their professional lives.  Spending some time now thinking of my top tips for new teachers will hopefully prepare me to be a better mentor. Here is my list: 1:  Do whatever you can to keep a work life balance.  This is different for everyone.  I personally like to take my college classes over the summer because I enjoy sleeping 8 hours per night during the school year.  I know even more teachers that prefer to keep those 8 weeks of summer completely free of school related work to recharge.  You have to decide what is best for you.  ...

This is my first year participating in Blaugust.  I started my blog just over a year ago and at that time I was not quite ready to attempt to blog daily for a month.  Honestly, I have a conference coming up later this week, so I may not even get through one week of daily blogging, but I'll try. I like to blog in general, not just as part of an initiative.  Very few people actually read my posts, but that is not why I write.  I write to help myself reflect on and serve as a record of my teaching.  I'm also completely in love with the #MTBoS.  I joined twitter first and spent about a year being a consumer in the #MTBoS.  At first I just lurked, then I started to reply to other peoples' ideas and requests for help.  Eventually I found that 140 characters was not always enough for me to share my ideas and Mathsational was born. I like to share the resources that I create and I like receiving constructive feedback.  I feel like I finally ...