Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Google labs - public data

Google labs - public data

Google is doing it again, bringing data visualization to a new level. I'm interested in seeing how students could use this tool to see relationships between different pieces of data, using the time lapse tool.

In several of the representations the movement of the data indicates some kind of rate of change that I would like to have students focus in on and explain in more depth. I think it's a very interesting tool to use with students.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/25/2010

  • Magnoto is a little like glogster. It's a nice little project tool. It is in beta and may not be stable enough for mass use, but it is pretty user friendly and can allow 5 people to work together on the same project. Each person can have their own page or can work together to create one page. 

    tags: web2.0 magnoto digitalstorytelling

  • Connecting Students through Video

    tags: web2.0 blog

  • We welcome you to our wiki and blog for supporting iPod & iPad devices in education. Although our focus is K-12, many of the techniques should work for you at any level and with any number of devices. On the wiki side of this site are the deployment and management articles, and on the blog side, you will find the classroom activities (written primarily by teachers) where iPods are supporting achievement improvement for our students. We are posting as many help and how-to articles here as we can and as quickly as we can so you can continue to be successful using iPod devices in your classroom. Please let us know if there are more or different things that you would like to have included here.

    tags: web2.0 ipod education wiki blog

  • Great app for having students create an educational product. I know Apple says it's a business app, but it has the kinds of multi-media tool compilation that makes for great education tool. 

    Students can easily capture/create an image on the iPod, annotate or draw on it while they narrate, and most importantly of all students can then email it to the teacher. 

    Not only can they create, they can share! 

    Katherine Burdick shared this on the iPod discussion in Classroom 2.0.

    tags: web2.0 ipod iphone audio

  • What started as a desire to know what technology access my students had turned into a great opportunity to get to know them, and what they thought about grades, learning, and their interests. Here’s a copy of the survey that I gave my students this year on the first day.

    Some of the responses to the questions were interesting enough to put in wordle form

    tags: web2.0 wiki technology google forms wordle

    • What started as a desire to know what technology access my students had turned into a great opportunity to get to know them, and what they thought about grades, learning, and their interests. Here’s a copy of the survey that I gave my s

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Friday, September 17, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/18/2010


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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/16/2010

  • y StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Since lack of space forces us to delete story files older than 1 month, please save the .pdf file that prints to your own computer.

    tags: education storytelling digitalstorytelling writing web2.0 animation

    • My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out.
      You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Since lack of space forces us to delete story files older than 1 month, please save the .pdf file that prints to your own computer.
  • Interesting blog post based on an article in the Boston Globe. 

    tags: education arts


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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/15/2010


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Thursday, September 9, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/10/2010


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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/09/2010

  • ast week I blogged about my Bloomin’ Peacock, a new Bloom’s Taxonomy visual I made to share with teachers in a training.  Over the years, I have created a number of Bloom’s Taxonomy pictures to hang in my classroom for students to refer to.  My Bloomin’ Peacock was such a hit with you all, I thought I would start sharing the others I’ve made.   Today I revived one that I created for my classroom and added the digital version (again the digital tools displayed relate directly to the Treasures reading curriculum).  This is my Um-bloom-ra Bloom’s Taxonomy:

    tags: blooms technology web2.0 blog

  • Distilled Demographics Video Series

    Distilled Demographics, PRB's new video series, highlights key demographic concepts such as fertility, mortality, and migration. Through these videos, each under 10 minutes, you can learn demography's real-world application and impact.

    In these videos, Carl Haub, PRB's senior demographer, talks about:

    Deciphering Population Pyramids
    Addressing Population Myths
    The Birth Rate: What It Is and Why It Matters

    tags: research education population reference




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Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/08/2010

    • “When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”
    • In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.


      But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

      • Break up study sessions and include practice tests with the study sessions to improve longevity of retention. 
    • We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
    • Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
      • I find it intriguing that teachers latch on to certain ideas and ignore research that contradicts their ideas. I thought learning styles was a more proven entity but there may be an issue with this.
    • The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.
      • Varying the environment around the student may then provide more stimulation and a greater opportunity for the student to learn/associate the information being provided/developed.
  • tags: research education study habits comprehension


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Friday, September 3, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/04/2010


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Thursday, September 2, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/03/2010

  • Lesson Study Toolkit Samples

    You will need Adobe Reader to view and print many of these documents.

    NOTE: The password for the video clips and any protected article is lessonstudy.

    tags: japanese lesson study lesson study toolkit

  • n Lesson Study teachers:

    Think about the long-term goals of education - such as love of learning and respect for others;

    Carefully consider the goals of a particular subject area, unit or lesson (for example, why science is taught, what is important about levers, how to introduce levers);

    Plan classroom "research lessons" that bring to life both specific subject matter goals and long term goals for students; and

    Carefully study how students respond to these lessons - including their learning, engagement, and treatment of each other.

    tags: japanese lesson study lesson study


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Monday, August 23, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/24/2010


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Monday, August 16, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/17/2010


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Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/11/2010


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Monday, August 9, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/10/2010


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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/06/2010

  • Edutopia is just confirming what we all know and believe. Why is it such a hard thing to implement well in the classroom? 
    We need to continue fighting for the chance for every student to have opportunities and expectations for communicating in class everyday as a regular/routine part of their learning. 

    tags: literacy edutopia

  • The website says: "THE Place For Educational Games!Our research-based and standards-aligned free educational math games and language arts games will engage, motivate, and help teach students. Click a button below to play our free multi-player and single-player games! In the future we'll add features enabling you to save records, tailor content for differentiated instruction, and pinpoint student problem areas."
    I think using the games in conjunction with a holistic approach to developing skills would make for a great way of getting students to practices some skills. Let students play, set goals, monitor those goals, reflect on their progress, and apply strategies/heuristics to specific problems they struggle with would create an environment in the classroom where learning was fun, self-monitored, and successful. 

    tags: interactive games technology web2.0

  • National Educational Technology Standards, Electronic Portfolio Templates

    Some interesting things to think about collecting and organizing for an e-portfolio. 

    tags: Portfolio NETS ISTE web2.0 instruction


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Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 08/04/2010

  • Interesting article that highlights teachers using vodcasting as a tool for extending instruction and working with students in a variety of media. I believe the model could work very well with the BMS iPod Touch project if teachers were interested in creating short videos of lecture that students could acces outside of class. 

    Mathematics is an easy course to consider. The teacher can model solving a problem, or applying an estimation technique that students could watch, create their own example applying the strategy, and turn in the product to the teacher. 

    the model produces a nice intersection of consumption of content, with using the tool for creation of content as well. 

    tags: education vodcasting Video keloland


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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/30/2010

  • In this unit, students will investigate a relationship between recursive functions and exponential functions.
    Math Content
    By the end of this unit, students will:
    Represent data using tables, graphs and rules
    Investigate patterns and make conjectures
    Express sequences with recursive and exponential rules
    Describe and interpret exponential functions that fit the patterns

    Individual Lessons

    Lesson 1 - Trains, Fibonacci, and Recursive Patterns

    In this lesson, students will use Cuisenaire Rods to build trains of different lengths and investigate patterns. Students will use tables to create graphs, define recursive functions, and approximate exponential formulas to describe the patterns.
    Lesson 2 - More Trains

    In this lesson, students will use Cuisenaire Rods to build trains of different lengths and investigate patterns. Students will use tables to create graphs, define recursive functions, and approximate exponential formulas to describe the patterns.
    Lesson 3 - Recursive and Exponential Rules

    In this lesson make connections between exponential functions and recursive rules. Students will use tables to create graphs, define recursive rules and find exponential formulas.

    tags: graphs algebra representation NCTM

  • Great set of lessons for modeling, recursive functions, real-life application from NCTM Illuminations. The lessons include not only context, but applets that help students visualize the situation and  mathematical model. 

    tags: graphs algebra representation

  • This is a compilation of Karl's Transparent Algebra posts. He does such an incredible job of making his thinking visible for all of us in how he is planning his course for the upcoming year. I share it because I think it's a valuable example of a reflective practitioner and worth sharing. If you have any teachers who might benefit from reading some of his reasoning, I encourage you to send them to his blog!

    tags: fischbowl course_design metacognition reflection planning

  • Great tool for sharing pictures from PC to PC. Doesn't work for iPods b/c guess what it needs flash (thanks Apple). 

    tags: web2.0 photos storage


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Monday, July 26, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/27/2010


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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/22/2010

  • Perhaps the easiest Wiki I've ever scene. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can now create a wiki for use with their students or to share information with colleagues. I wonder what their business model is and how long they will be able to sustain this approach, but until then I plan on using orb.com with teachers as a great entry point tool. 

    tags: wiki web2.0 webdesign


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Monday, July 19, 2010

Friday, July 16, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/17/2010


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Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 07/15/2010


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Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 06/24/2010


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Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 06/16/2010

  • Nice set of applets that let students explore fraction understanding from multiple perspectives and models. I love that they use a variety of models for fractional development, including bars (multiple versions), sets, and linear.
    From the site:  "Why Fractions? Fractions are one of the earliest stumbling blocks for students in math. Our goal is building conceptual understanding in fractions as a basis for comprehension in all later topics."

    tags: math, fractions, conceptua, web2.0, applets, interactive, iwb

  • Instructional strategies determine the approach a teacher may take to achieve learning objectives.
    Five categories of instructional strategies and explanation of these five categories can be found within this site.

    tags: Instruction, strategies, pedagogy, online

  • Great article on looking at test preparation differently. It's not about answering a lot of questions similar to the ones on the test, but about learning processes that help students understand how to garner information from text/problems, etc. 

    tags: scholastic, comprehension, during-read, instruction


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Monday, June 14, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 06/15/2010


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Friday, June 11, 2010

Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 06/12/2010


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