Sunday, December 19, 2010

An adventure!

Back in August (the day before the first day of school, I think), I received an e-mail from Tom Sallee, a professor at the University of California-Davis.  (I referenced it here.)  He asked if I would be interested in being a part of a panel that he was trying to put together on behalf of the College Preparatory Mathematics book company to try and figure out the future of math involving technology.

Me?

He mentioned Dan Meyer in the e-mail, so I checked with Dan on twitter and discovered that this was a legit (and amazing) offer.  I called Tom, we discussed a little more of what he was thinking of, and I told him I'd love to be there.

The meeting's been set for the first weekend in February in Sacramento, California. (I've never been to California before!)  Tom e-mailed me the draft agenda so I could see what all was going to happen and also asked me to bring some student work to present.

I'll give you all some of the topics later so you can tell me the right answers, but for now, here's what I threw together to show my student work.


               
   
Any thoughts?  Good or bad, please.

1 comment:

David said...

It's a great opportunity. I'd love it if you could throw a plug in their for Conrad Wolfram's amazing TED talk about mathematical computation...

Basically, technology lets students do the computation step of mathematical problem solving, and most professional mathematicians use computers & calculators for this various purpose. Learning a huge amount of mathematical computation for a little bit of gain in understanding seems a bit futile.

I'd also mention that using multimedia in mathematics is a powerful tool for understanding.

Please don't let this meeting become "how can we all duplicate the Khan Academy" because in my opinion, just creating videos for our students to watch is not 100% productive. We need more than just what the Khan Academy offers (although it is a useful side-tool).