Sunday, November 19, 2006

Dr. Math, Classroom Blogging, and Spreadsheets

I've been lucky this year to teach my first set of accelerated math classes. I've always considered math my favorite subject to teach and my strength, no matter what group of students I've had. But this group of students has made teaching math more enjoyable than ever, simply because they have more ability and motivation than any other students I have ever had. Most of them actually like math and want to learn more than what's in the textbook.

To quench their thirst, I've been exploring a site called Dr. Math looking for novel problems, and explanations to problems from class, for the kids to solve. In fact, I even based my last test on this problem on repeating and terminating decimals. I've posted links on my classroom blog to Dr. Math pages for students to check out at home and use for homework help.

Pointing my students to this website has taught them that math exists outside of the classroom. That I, the teacher, don't have all the answers and that they can actually find explanations to classroom problems themselves. Dr. Math has even led me to believe that I can have my students do a research project, something I've never had math students do.

In more news, I've done some serious updates to the classroom blogging section of my Future of Math webpage and I'm trying to get some folks over to check them out. These are in addition to the updates to my spreadsheets in the classroom page, to which I've added several printable spreadsheet activities.

Spreadsheets in the Classroom
| Classroom Blogging | Alphabet Geometry

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1 comment:

Laura B. Fogle said...

Thanks for the great set of links on spreadsheet use in math!

Laura B. Fogle
tech4teaching.blogspot.com