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.)

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