Ratios

Dan Meyer posts a comical video about ratios this week in his blog. Titled, "Nana's Paint Mix Up", he is texting Nana about mixing paint. She asks him to mix paint for her at a ratio of one red to five white. Dan completes the task only to find out she messed up the ratio. Nana realized it was suppose to five red to one white. This cute, comical video could be a creative way to open a lesson about ratios. It could be a tool to use to get the attentions of students at the beginning of class.

Making Numbers

Ms. Cassidy's first graders have been working with numbers up to one hundred this week. They have been counting and making piles of numbers. Then they use their iPads to take pictures and record their numbered piles. Ms. Cassidy is always incorporating technology into her classroom. She makes learning fun for her students by making everything interactive.

Visually Appealing

I work in a restaurant five days a week. I have looked at our menu over and over again. I know that thing like the back of my hand, so I don't really pay much attention to it anymore. Our menu is extremely large and when looking through it, customers seem to get lost. Taking a closer look at it the other day, I noticed how the managers try to make certain items more visually appealing. They always tell us to sell, sell, sell! But, the way they set up the written presentation is important. They will always put the most "appealing", aka what they want to sell the most of, appetizer or entree first. They create a lightly shaded, colored box around certain items that they want to draw the customer's eye to. Another thing we do in the restaurant to appeal to customers visually is dessert. We do not just have a dessert menu, we have a dessert tray. We create a dessert tray each day so that way the desserts are visually appealing to our customers. It is way easier to sell that chocolate mousse cake when it is right in front of the customer's face than if we just had a description on a piece of paper.

Visual Communication in Education

Life on the Screen: Visual Literacy in Education

George Lucas is an American cinema legend, known for his films Star Wars, American Graffiti, and Raiders of the Lost Arc. He believes that we need to begin working on the American education system now. He feels as though schools are not using the tools of today. The schools are stuck in a "time capsule" and using the methods and ideas of the past. Lucas feels as though we need to work on communication, not only written and spoken, but graphics, music, and cinema as well. These are the types of communication intertwined with the culture of today. Lucas does make a great point when he says that measuring these types of visual communication in an institution would be difficult. However, he does believe there is rules to these visual communications just there is in math. Lucas feels as though you can teach how different colors and different chords can be used to convey different emotions. He believes in a circle of communication. He begins with math, the least emotional, then to the written and spoken communication, and finally to the visual communications, like art and music. Lucas fears we have do not focus enough on the visual and the emotional, and we have put all our focus on the intellectual. He makes a very great point about the dangers of not teaching visual communication to students. We have doctors, lawyers, and even professors who are extremely intelligent. Yet, they cannot communicate visually and can struggle to get a point across. Lucas feels we need to focus on teaching students to tell a story rather than teaching them to store facts. Another great point Lucas makes is how different the business world and the education world are. The business world thrives on change and if you do not keep up, you will never make it. The education world, on the other hand, looks for stability. He sees the faults in our society. Not enough money or emphasis is put on our education system. He puts it best, "Nothing is accomplished through conquest. Everything is accomplished through education."

Reading Film: The Story of Movies

A sixth grade class from Santa Barbara is analyzing scenes from films like "To Kill a Mockingbird", for a project called "The Story of Movies" developed by Martin Scorsese . This project challenges students and teachers to look at film through three different lenses, a communication tool , a historical document, and a work of art. Scorsese wants to train "the eye and the heart of the students to look at a film in a different way by asking questions and pointing to different  ideas, different concepts." This program helps to teach students that everything they see on film and on television is not real. It teaches them to analyze how it is made and how it is fake. "The Story of Movies" program is a free program that is accessible to educators all across the country. The goal is for students to learn the history of the movie, learn about the tools filmmakers use to make these movies, and learn how to convey different emotions.

Pick a Point

Dan Meyer posted a video in his blog this week of a workshop he did in Spokane last week. He had two different people pick a point from the image below.

The first person had to describe to the other where his point was located, describing it as in the middle, third up from the bottom. The other person was asked on a scale of 1 to 10 if they knew where the point being described was located. They did not. So the first person was asked to describe their point more specifically, which was described as having two points not directly under neither it, but off a little bit on an angle to the right.

This was the chosen point.

The second person was then asked to describe their point, except they had a little help.

Clearly, this made it very simple to describe where the point was located. The point of this activity was about naming points. One of the first things students learn in geometry is naming points and lines. Meyer created this activity to make it more interesting for his students. He did not want to do the boring, old defining terms and just letting the students forget about them.

iPad's in the Classroom

This podcast by Meghna Chakrabarti is about tablets and the challenge of building the best twenty first century classroom. Her first guest is Shayne Evans, the director of the four campuses of the University of Chicago Charter School. This includes elementary, middle schools, and high schools. Here, students in grades six, seven, and eight have had access to laptops for about eight years. Now, they have introduced iPad carts to classrooms in the high schools which allows for a one to one ratio, student to iPad. This allows students to to take notes in class on the iPad. They are able to access Google Drive and work on their research projects for engineering. Lower grade levels do not have the one to one ratio, but they share iPads and work in stations with apps such as Study Island. Notability is another app they use in the classroom which enables students to record classes. This app is a digital graphic organizer. It allows students to organize their notes and thoughts. Classrooms are both textbook and tablet friendly. Evans stresses the importance of having both written text and technology in the classroom. He feels as though the increase in test scores comes from many things, but technology has definitely helped. There is always the concern for distraction. Evans stresses the importance of engagement. Teachers have always had to get students excited about learning. The best teachers hae management systems for the use of technology. An example would be the way the students seating is arranged. There is also programs in which you can view all of your students screens. Creating chat rooms just for the classroom allows teachers to see which students are actually participating. Evans makes a great point that it is using strategies that teachers would normally use and apply them to technology. Chakrabarti also mentions that according to Chicago public schools technology director, iPads have boosted test scores in math, reading, and science fifty to sixty percent.

The second guest is Janet Frazier, a mother and candidate for school board in Lexington, South Carolina. Her son in seventh grade has been issued an iPad from school to take home with him. Right now in her school district, the technology is new. They just issued 16,500 iPads to middle school and high school students at $6.25 million. She feels as though this has not made a difference yet. They have only downloaded five educational apps to the iPads. Frazier is concerned about server capacity. Students iPads are freezing up. The district has blocked some apps, like Facebook, but not other apps (Instagram, FaceTime) and games. Frazier makes a great point when she says that the teachers should have received the iPads a year prior to giving them to all the students so that they would be able to learn about them. Evans supports this argument. In his schools, they have technology nights for parents so they can learn about the devices and apps their students are using. It is not just about giving students the technology, it is about teaching students to critically think. Social skills is a concern of many parents. Operating only electronically diminishes social skills. Other parents feel as though the iPad encourages social skills. Examples include students working in groups on the iPads, sharing documents, filming projects, reading out loud in class, etc.

The third guest is Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He believes technology is a tool and the extent to which is helps depends on how it is implemented. Young minds very intuitive, but how quickly they learn basic applications is less important than critical thinking. Willingham mentions that critical thinking is nothing without the facts. Both need to be intertwined when teaching students. Evans brings up the point again about the importance of both textbooks and technology. He uses the example of students reading their textbook for facts and then using their tablet to see what is on the web. Another concern they address is the importance of being able to identify the validity of a website, teaching students to be good decision makers. Teachers need to find a way to balance technology in their classroom. We need a better way to engage students while still teaching them something at the same time.

Function Carnival

Dan Meyer created a post last week about the program that I had mentioned in a previous post, Function Carnival. Meyer helped create this online math program to make test taking more fun for students. In this recent post, he shows us three different examples for students to graph the motion of rides at the carnival. 

Cannon Man's Graph 

The students would be given cannon man and be asked to graph his motion. Here, they would end up with a graph that is both quadratic and linear.

Bumper Car's Graph

The students would be given the path of a bumper car and asked to graph the motion. Here, they would have drawn a piece-wise linear function.

Ferris Wheel Graph

Students would be given the motion of a Ferris wheel and be asked to graph it. Here, the graph would be sinusoidal.

I think this is a great program and a wonderful way to get students more interested in what they are learning. It would be much more fun for them to view carnival rides and then try to graph them with this program then for them to sit there with pencil and paper. The graphs go from simple linear to sinusoidal graphs so varying ages and grades could use this program.

"Real World" Math

"Real World" math is a term that I noticed is used in several posts throughout Dan Meyer's blog. Because of all the snow and the freezing temperatures we have gotten over the past couple weeks, Meyer mentioned that the school district would let the buses idle over night in fear they would not start. One of the students then posed the question, "How much did that cost?" And this is where the term "Real World" math comes into play. A great question and a great conversation starter. "Real World" math would be considered math that you can relate to real life scenarios. Meyer points out that just because its real world math does not necessarily make it more interesting and effective for students. He posed the question and received this great response:


2014 Feb 02. Molly:

Ineffective: If gas costs 3.38 per gallon, and the bus burns 1.1 gallons per hour idling, what is the cost of the fuel burned by 32 buses over a period of 13 hours?

Effective: 1. What questions do we need to ask in order to answer this question?

I find things like this interesting as a future math teacher because you want to keep excitement in your classroom. You do not want to sit there and bore your students by lecturing and getting the dreaded question "But will I ever really need to know this?". Posing the question what do we need to know in order to answer the how much does it cost question is much more effective then just throwing numbers at students and letting the calculator do all the work.

Blogging

In Ms. Cassidy's blog this week, she posted a couple more videos of challengers from the Snow Clothes Challenge. As explained in one of my earlier posts, Ms. Cassidy challenged teachers and students from all over to post YouTube videos completely the same challenge. It was a cute and fun way for the students to see other classrooms all over the country.

Another interesting post that I found on Ms. Cassidy's blog was her teaching her own first grade students about blogging. I also mentioned in an earlier post how Ms. Cassidy has created blogs for each of her students for them to track their personal progress on activities they do in class. This week she was teaching her students how to comment on other kids' blogs. "We’re learning to say kind things, to make connections and to ask questions." I think that this idea is great. I personally did not know how to blog until now, and I am twenty three years old. She has taught first grade students how to do the same. I feel as though this goes along with what we spoke of in class, how this generation is so much different than ours. Incorporating technology into teaching is so important now.