Online Professional Development Sessions

But Wait! There’s More!

Just in Time For Midterms

In most systems, student understanding is monitored through the implementation of pretests, midterms or interims, and finals. Some systems apply a bit of pressure upon teachers to meet an arbitrary deadline to have taught a certain set of standards. Others use it to monitor growth of understanding.

Whatever pressures applied within your system, I’m sure you could use some great review activities. This post provides a kinesthetic review requiring students to take ownership of their claims. In the Human Bingo Review Activity, Eric Biederbeck explains how students complete a bingo board by having classmates and the teacher sign off indicating they know the answers to given problems. In order for anyone to win bingo, everyone who signed the problems in the row identified must prove they actually know the correct answer. Perfect for those middle schoolers who like to try and beat the system.

Another activity which is great for the class that is talkative and needs movement for engagement is discussed in this post. With this adaptable matching game, students solve multiple problems and they must find someone in the class who has the same answer as them.

If these activities do not fit your teaching style, take a moment to watch the GMD professional learning session as outlined in this post. “Review Activities That Don’t Suck” is worth the time of preparing your students for midterms and for finals.

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

There’s Got To Be An Easier Way!
 

Julie Reulbach has a great lesson for introducing logarithms, but her blog post is worth reading regardless of what level of math you teach. Nestled in this simple blog post is a vital pedagogical idea, which is that students need to need a tool before you introduce them to it.

Julie asks her students to determine how many hours it will take for their whole school to be infested with zombies if the number of zombies triples every hour. Of course, the student body isn’t a perfect power of three, so the students are stuck guessing and checking as they get infinitesimally close to the correct number of hours. At one point, one of her students even shouts “There’s got to be an easier way!” as if he is a frustrated housewife in the black-and-white segment of an infomercial. By the time she introduces logarithms, students are primed to understand and value their purpose.

Check out her post, and all her other great lessons, at her blog.

Written by Kent Haines (@MrAKHaines)

Once Upon a Timeline…

Coding, explaining, storytelling, and my continued fascination with the Desmos Activity Builder occupied my mind during the last couple of weeks. Andy Schwen (@mrschwen) gets his students to write code in order to deepen their understanding of math concepts, not unlike the reason I get my own students to create their own geogebras and desmos’s. His post about that is from May, but for some reason, I only saw it this week. This week, Kalid Azad published another gem of a post at his Betterexplained website, this time about making sense of trig identities. Admittedly, it involves math that my students are not familiar with, complex numbers, but it’s still a beautiful visual and verbal work of art. I found another post about the Desmos Activity Builder, this one from Cathy Yenca (@mathycathy). And the storytelling? Well, in my last newsletter contribution, I started a list of blogposts about the activity builder. I wanted to share ideas and reflections on best practices. Since then I decided to keep adding to that list chronologically, because that way I get to watch how the tool and the community are transforming each other symbiotically. I’m keeping that list on this page if you’re interested, or if you’d like to add to it, just tweet me at @a_mcsquared.

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

The Global Math Department is looking for individuals who are interested in planning the Tuesday night webinars hosted on Big Marker. GMD bookers contact potential speakers regarding speaking opportunities, and provide them with details on planning sessions. If you are interested in being more involved with the Global Math Department, contact Heather at heather.m.kohn@gmail.com or Dylan at dkane47@gmail.com.