Old Dogs, New Math: Homework Help for Puzzled Parents

I love math, but I haven’t always. For all the years of my life preceding my education as a teacher, I despised the subject. The rules, equations, and abstract concepts had little meaning to me and were sometimes beyond my comprehension. It wasn’t until I started my training as a teacher that I began to look at math differently. In my classes, I relearned many of the concepts that I found so unappealing through activities that brought them to life. I was taught to understand what I was learning so that I could later pass that understanding on to my students.

Unfortunately, the opportunity to learn math in this way does not exist for the parents of many children. Until now that is. Old Dogs, New Math: Homework Help for Puzzled Parents is a wonderful resource for parents struggling to find ways to help their children with the math they’re expected to learn at school. This book offers a short course on the concepts taught in today’s elementary schools and does so in a way that brings parents up to date on many of the new techniques teachers use to teach them. I have to admit that as a fifth grade teacher I was surprised (and excited!) to see so many of the strategies that I have used time and again in my classroom (and many more that I haven’t used but will soon!).

Do not confuse this book with a boring survey of math though; each chapter is full of engaging text, pictures and diagrams, sample questions, and engaging math games. One of the book’s best features is its emphasis on understanding the mistakes that kids make on their math homework. In each chapter, parents learn the common challenges that kids have with specific concepts and can even see real mistakes that they make in solving certain problems.

Old Dogs is a very worthwhile read and a handy book to keep around until the last of your children heads off to middle school. It does for parents what my training in education did for me—take the fear and loathing out of math and make it an enjoyable subject.

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Made to Stick & Inquiry

I picked up the book Made to Stick after reading about it on the Presentation Zen blog. As with all the books I read now that I like, I checked out the author blog and decided to subscribe. The book, and the blog, are very teacher friendly. Seeking to answer the questions Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas?, the information they present can surely help any teacher make his/her lessons stickier. In fact, the authors often talk about how to their strategies in the classroom.

Several of their recent blog posts caught my attention. Check out Oceanography, Amplified; 100 Books for 100 Stories; and The Screaming Man in the Four Stroke Engine.

The strategies they present seem very much like those used in an inquiry-based approach. Check it out and see if you agree.



Technorati Tags: Made to Stick, education, blogs

Check out: www.misterteacher.com | Digital Cameras in the Classroom | Alphabet Geometry

Paper Airplanes, Online Presentations

Paper Airplane Lesson Plan

In my effort to create an online archive of lesson plans that stresses quality over quantity, I've added another of my more successful science lessons to my website. It's about paper airplanes and the scientific method. Here's a brief overview of the lesson:

Students work with a partner to create two paper airplanes, each with a different design. They then fly the paper airplanes a set number of times and observe how far each goes. The lesson acts as a perfect introduction to the scientific method. Through it, students learn how to:

• Ask scientific questions
• Formulate hypotheses
• Clearly write procedures
• Collect data
• Draw conclusions
• Identify variables

The lesson has three stages: an observation period, a whole class experiment, and student experiments. An optional fourth stage would be a presentation of results. It also offers many opportunities for the incorporation of technology. Tech tips appear throughout the lesson.

Click here to download and view the lesson.

Online Presentations - Which site is best?

As a teacher who likes to hit the presentation circuit, I've been trying out some online slideshow software. Last February, I embedded a flickr slideshow in a post and liked it quite well. But embedding flickr slideshows isn't always the best way to share your slides. Below are my thoughts on some of the sites that allow users to share their presentations.

• About a month ago Tim Lauer posted about SlideShare, a site where you can upload a preexisting PowerPoint or OpenOffice slideshow. This is pretty handy since it means you no longer have to save your shows as a web page and then upload them to a server. Of course, the site is a also about social networking as users can tag presentations and comment on them as well. Here's SlideShare's major limitation: there's no way to publish a notes page. My slides are simple--they mostly contain a photo, a sentence, phrase, or sometimes just a single word. Bullet points are scarce in my presentations. Therefore, it's hard to get much information from them if I can't publish a notes page.

• Another site that I have tried is Thumbstacks. This site allows users to actually create, edit, and share the slideshow online. It's full of great features, unless you're into animations and transitions, it doesn't support those yet. But, once again, it doesn't have a notes page.

• Embedding a flickr slideshow works best if you have notes about each slide that you'd like to share with others. However, the slides come from photos in your archive and I can't imagine trying to turn my PowerPoint slides into images and uploading them to my flickr account.

The verdict: I like using PowerPoint to create my presentations, so Thumbstacks is out. I think for now my choice is SlideShare. If the slides are good enough and contain links to relevant websites, they can be powerful enough on their own to get your message across.



Technorati Tags: Thumbstacks | SlideShare | teachers


Check out: Digital Cameras in the Classroom | Spreadsheets in the Classroom | Technology in the Classroom

Swicki: The Best Search Engine for the Classroom

Several weeks ago I came across a post on another blog about a tool called a swicki, or a community powered search engine. After checking it out, I created my own and stuck it at the top of my classroom blog. Since then, it has become an invaluable tool.

So what makes it such a great tool? I like it for these reasons:

• Complete Control: As creator of the swicki I have complete control of the search engine.
  
• I can promote sites that I know are useful, or exclude sites that are not relevant or that I don't want my kids to search. Click here to see the sites I promoted for a search I created on Ancient Greece. The sites with the next to them are promoted sites. Because I checked out the sites ahead of time, my students wasted no time trying to find information on sites that are either too advanced for them or have nothing worth reading.
• I can add one or two keywords that pertain to my swicki (mine are kids & teachers) to all of my searches. For instance, if my students search for Greece, the keywords kids and teachers are automatically added to that search.
  
• The Buzz Cloud: The swicki shows a buzz cloud of what my kids are searching for on my site. Once again, I have control of the tags that are placed here. This means that I can test out different search keywords ahead of time in order to find the one that gives the best results and then place that keyword in the buzz cloud. Students only need to click on it then to find a host of related sites that I have promoted for their research.
• Customization: I have control of the colors, font, and layout of the swicki.
• Get the Code: It's easy to cut and paste the code for your swicki into your blog or webpage.
  

I think a swicki is a fine addition to any teacher's webpage. With one, you can have your kids going to the sites you want them to go to and still getting valuable research skills at the same time.

Check out Future of Math & misterteacher.com.

swicki | teachers | search engines | education

Writely: Blogging Handout as a Webpage

I've got a presentation coming up next month at the eTech Ohio State Technology Conference called Blogging Across the Curriculum in which I plan to relate my experiences with using blogs in the classroom. I just posted the agenda using Writely.

I gotta say, I really like this whole web-based word processing thing. Working on a document from home and work without having to transport it on a disk or email it back and forth is beyond convenient. I also like the fact that I can publish my documents in several different formats, particularly as a web page.