Friday, February 26, 2010
I Heart Twitter
My Algebra 2 kids are taking a quiz right now on Solving Quadratics (they have to decide which method to use, which is the hardest part of the problem for them!) so I thought I'd get some planning done. This year's been a weird one for me. Normally I'm planned a week or 2 in advance and have everything ready to go. Now, though, I really feel like I'm day-to-day on what I want to do. The assignments that I'm supposed to have posted for the week on Monday afternoon sometimes don't get posted until Wednesday (if at all - shh!).
We're finishing up a chapter in my Integrated Geometry class about lines, functions, and variation. The next chapter in the book is one about transformations - I usually skip it because I think it's boring and at this point in the year the kids have normally already taken the OGT (which is the only reason why I'd do the chapter anyway). Besides, they all know the vocab (reflect, translate, rotate) enough to do what they need to do on the test.
This year, though, I'm ahead of where I normally am (and I'm not sure why). The OGT is still 2 weeks away, so I thought it might be beneficial for the kids if I spend some time on the transformations. Instead of doing the whole chapter, though, I thought it might be more interesting to do a boot camp of sorts. I'd like to take 2 - 3 days and just run through them all to discover some relationships.
So then I was stuck. I know there's got to be some resources "out there" for me to use but I'm ultimately a lazy person and would rather not have to get out there to find and edit it myself. I put out a tweet at 8:19 this morning and by 8:20 had a response (from @PersidaB) about using Sketchpad and a project she's done. By 8:38 I had 3 more people respond with either links or ideas of what to do. (Thanks to @k8nowak, @nyates314, and @Sarah_IC !).
Twitter is a beautiful thing.
I'll post what I end up with when I decide what to do. :)
(But here's the link from k8nowak and there's this one from nyates314.)
We're finishing up a chapter in my Integrated Geometry class about lines, functions, and variation. The next chapter in the book is one about transformations - I usually skip it because I think it's boring and at this point in the year the kids have normally already taken the OGT (which is the only reason why I'd do the chapter anyway). Besides, they all know the vocab (reflect, translate, rotate) enough to do what they need to do on the test.
This year, though, I'm ahead of where I normally am (and I'm not sure why). The OGT is still 2 weeks away, so I thought it might be beneficial for the kids if I spend some time on the transformations. Instead of doing the whole chapter, though, I thought it might be more interesting to do a boot camp of sorts. I'd like to take 2 - 3 days and just run through them all to discover some relationships.
So then I was stuck. I know there's got to be some resources "out there" for me to use but I'm ultimately a lazy person and would rather not have to get out there to find and edit it myself. I put out a tweet at 8:19 this morning and by 8:20 had a response (from @PersidaB) about using Sketchpad and a project she's done. By 8:38 I had 3 more people respond with either links or ideas of what to do. (Thanks to @k8nowak, @nyates314, and @Sarah_IC !).
Twitter is a beautiful thing.
I'll post what I end up with when I decide what to do. :)
(But here's the link from k8nowak and there's this one from nyates314.)
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Diigo Updates 02/26/2010
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
So my only posts lately have been diigo updates. Can you tell I'm busy looking for new stuff?
I'm currently 3:15 into a 3:30 long parent conference evening. I've talked with 8 parents and have had a lot of down time to get work done (thank goodness!). Unfortunately, I could use another 3:30 to get done what I planned to get done. Oh well!
I spent my first hour or so working on a puzzle for Algebra 2 tomorrow. We're finishing up solving quadratic equations (using Factoring, CtS, Quadratic Formula, and Square Roots) and while we've done each one separately (and I've quizzed each one separately) I feel like the kids need to be able to decide on their own what the best method is to use for each individual equation. I gave a worksheet today to help them practice (along with a flow chart that I came up with) and edited @nyates314 's quadratics puzzle for tomorrow. Took a while (and I ended up hand-writing it - yuck!) but I think it'll be good. We'll see!
Got an e-mail from @samjshah today about getting together some project ideas. I don't know that I posted about this earlier in the year, but here's a Slide Rule project that I put together when we were doing logs that I (and maybe a few of the kids :) ) enjoyed. (Sorry if this is a repeat on the blog! I honestly don't recall if I posted it earlier or not.)
I'm currently 3:15 into a 3:30 long parent conference evening. I've talked with 8 parents and have had a lot of down time to get work done (thank goodness!). Unfortunately, I could use another 3:30 to get done what I planned to get done. Oh well!
I spent my first hour or so working on a puzzle for Algebra 2 tomorrow. We're finishing up solving quadratic equations (using Factoring, CtS, Quadratic Formula, and Square Roots) and while we've done each one separately (and I've quizzed each one separately) I feel like the kids need to be able to decide on their own what the best method is to use for each individual equation. I gave a worksheet today to help them practice (along with a flow chart that I came up with) and edited @nyates314 's quadratics puzzle for tomorrow. Took a while (and I ended up hand-writing it - yuck!) but I think it'll be good. We'll see!
Got an e-mail from @samjshah today about getting together some project ideas. I don't know that I posted about this earlier in the year, but here's a Slide Rule project that I put together when we were doing logs that I (and maybe a few of the kids :) ) enjoyed. (Sorry if this is a repeat on the blog! I honestly don't recall if I posted it earlier or not.)
Diigo Updates 02/25/2010
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
I embedded a youtube video a couple of weeks ago on my precalc class blog. It showed a huge Sierpinski triangle made of Doritos on a football field. (Yes, I know, I'm a geek, but I thought it was really cool!) I know my precalc kids check out the blog somewhat often (even if just to find their notes, review sheet answers!) but never comment. I have a stat-tracker checking it just to make sure. So I hardly ever check to see if there are comments on it.
Yesterday, though, I posted an extra credit opportunity for the kids on it and asked them either to comment that they'd seen it or send me an e-mail before tomorrow morning (then they were to actually do the problems). I figured this would help the spread of kids telling kids about the extra credit at school tomorrow and them getting out of checking the blog for it. Anyway, I was just checking to see if there were any comments (there were 3) from students and noticed a comment on that previous post about the Doritos. It was from a guy saying that his class made the video and left a link to another youtube video that's the making of the first video. Fun!
This is the link to the original video. Here's his behind the scenes look.
Yesterday, though, I posted an extra credit opportunity for the kids on it and asked them either to comment that they'd seen it or send me an e-mail before tomorrow morning (then they were to actually do the problems). I figured this would help the spread of kids telling kids about the extra credit at school tomorrow and them getting out of checking the blog for it. Anyway, I was just checking to see if there were any comments (there were 3) from students and noticed a comment on that previous post about the Doritos. It was from a guy saying that his class made the video and left a link to another youtube video that's the making of the first video. Fun!
This is the link to the original video. Here's his behind the scenes look.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Diigo Updates 02/15/2010
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Diigo Updates 02/13/2010
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Diigo Updates 02/04/2010
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Have I mentioned how much I love twitter? Love it. For the people who don't "get it", you're missing out on a lot of camradery and community. Check out Sam's post here.
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