Online Professional Development Sessions

The Word from the #MTBoS

Functions are an important part of Algebra and require a lot of abstract thinking on the part of students who may be used to the concreteness arithmetic from earlier grades. Kent Haines decided to put together a blog post that details the activities that he uses. The post, Functions Are Finally Clicking, walks through the activities he does in the beginning days of the unit and the kind of thinking he is trying to foster along the way. “My students have a better understanding of the meaning of a function,” Kent says as he describes his success, “and I have laid the groundwork for some great upcoming work with slope and linear functions.” Before the unit begins, Kent plays a lot of “Guess My Rule”, a game which Michael Pershan expanded on in the post What’s My Function, Rule, or Formula?. Michael’s post is definitely required reading if you’re preparing to use the game. The unit kicks off in earnest with the Function Carnival Desmos activity, followed by a Shell Centre activity on interpreting graphs, and also uses a card sort from Sarah at Math Equals Love. The entire post is interesting for people who teach functions, but it is also valuable to see how a teacher stitches together the various activities that are passed around in the #MTBoS.

Written by Carl Oliver (@carloliwitter)

Every time I visit Steve Wyborney’s blog I’m reminded of how much fun math can be when we just play. Last week, Steve posted his most recent free resource Splat! Part-whole thinking plays a huge roll in the development of students’ number sense and Splat goes right after it.

How many dots are under the Splat?

Big shout out to Steve for sharing all his lessons in a downloadable PowerPoint. While visiting, be sure to check out the links at the bottom of the post to find more of his interactive gems. Steve says that he’s “on a learning mission” and I’m thankful he’s taking us all along.  
 
Written by Graham Fletcher (@gfletchy)
 

Online Professional Development Sessions

The #MTBoS Never Sleeps

What Job Would I Do if I Didn’t Teach?

If I ever do something else for a living besides teaching math, it might be to make cool visuals and videos like the one Dominic Walliman (@dominicwalliman) made about the map of mathematics. What a perfect blend of visual appeal and fascinating content. I especially love the Foundations part at the end, about getting a glimpse at the whole universe through math.

Or I might teach programming, or at least use it to teach vectors, which is what Rhett Allain (@rjallain) writes about in this Wired article. I’ve always loved the idea of getting my students to make something (GeoGebra, for example) behave a certain way by using their math knowledge.

Or I’d become an edtech coach, and emulate Jenn Vadnais (@rilesblue), who does that job as only a teacher could, as a true teaching team member. Not only that, but Jenn writes about it in glorious and enlightening detail. I love how Jenn tells us the whole story – what worked, what didn’t, what she’d do differently, as well as all the details of using the Desmos Activity Builder. This time she wrote about using Andrew Stadel’s (@mrstadel) grade 6 lesson on inequalities.

Of course, these people are all teachers doing this stuff because they love it. I’ll just keep doing that, too.

Written by Audrey McLaren (@a_mcsquared)

Bypassing Understanding for the Ease

I’ve been guilty of it, too. Feeling the pressure of the pacing guide and succumbing to the path of least resistance. As Joe Schwartz shared in his recent post Ball Don’t Lie, teachers everyday succumb to the same ordeal. This teacher, wanting students to complete a task on comparing fractions, felt students would have an easier time by finding common denominators through the use of the “butterfly method.” Through his discussions with students, Joe proves the whiteboard don’t lie.

In Asking Better Questions, Kristin Gray shows another way we can bypass understanding for ease through the questions we ask students. From the examples provided within this post, we see there’s a huge difference in exploring students’ understanding based on the questions they are asked.

Often we find, when we bypass understanding, we have to circle back to help students build that understanding. So why not just take the time upfront to give the students what they really need?

Written by Jenise Sexton (@MrsJeniseSexton)

Desmos Design and Principles

Desmos, everyone’s favorite graphing calculator, has released ten new activities over the past quarter. Dan Meyer has written a summary of each of the activities on his blog. Moreover, he is working on a series of posts to get under the hood at Desmos and explain some of their design principles, through the prism of these new activities.

First up is an article on the lawnmower and pool border problems. Each of these problems illustrates Desmos’s design principle to “create an intellectual need for new mathematical skills.”

In both problems, the tools of algebra provide a gateway to generalizing the underlying math in the scenario. By building up to algebraic expressions through estimations and calculations, these activities give kids an opportunity to see algebra as an improvement over brute-force number crunching.

Stay tuned to Dan’s blog for future entries, and while you wait, you can explore those ten new activities as well as all the other great activities that Desmos has to offer.

Written by Kent Haines (@KentHaines)