Happy Valentine's Day
I missed Groundhog Day entirely this year (where was I?) and blew Valentine’s day with a dismal HPI (see below), so I’m dedicating most of this blog to the upcoming π day.
When our carbon footprint is increasing exponentially but our sense of well-being is static or rising only very slowly, what does that say about the state of the planet? Perhaps we need to readjust our notions of love and giving and think about rebranding Valentine’s Day.
Let them eat pi . . .
We’re a month away from π day. On 3/14 at 1:59 I’ll be on Spring Break, but if you’re in class you can enjoy a slice of pie with your students and take a moment to ponder this video.
To help you get ready for math class on Monday if you took too much time away from your work this Valentine’s weekend to 'canoodle' with your honey, here are 2 great collections:
I received this link via the Diigo Discovery Educator’s Network. In Mr. Vizza’s own words the purpose of his website is to:
- Serve as a portal to facilitate classroom instruction on a daily basis.
- Give students access to supportive material so they can advance their learning when they encounter adversity with homework and projects.
- Serve as an archive for SMART Board Notes created during class.
- Serve as an archive for answers to practice tests and practice quizzes which are worked out on the SMART Board.
- Serve as an archive for flashcards that can be used to drill needed skills.
- Integrate the shared knowledge of others into my lesson plans.
- Share professional knowledge and information with teachers and students.
Although some of the material can only be viewed if you have Notebook Software, there are lots of lesson aids that are in more standard formats. Here’s a link to the Feb. 10 edition of James Hollis’ blog – Teachers Love Smart Boards -- for more information about Mr. Vizza’s great collection of resources.
This is incredible collection of Jim’s own animations and links to other interactive quizzes, an interactive flash-based glossary, and resource websites he likes. For those of us in Western and Northern Canada, he’s organized it all by the strands in the WNCP. (Interestingly Alberta, originally the lead province on the math subject area of that project, is now about to opt out of the Protocol altogether!)
My advice?!? Take some time during Spring Break to search through here and make your own links list from this huge compendium. Often the gems are near the bottom of a page, so scroll all the way down and chances are you’ll find something useful. No wonder Jim was given this seal of recognition by Dave at The Teacher List (also Canadian & I think from Alberta).
GCalc is a free and easy-to-use graphing calculator you install on your computer. The graphs can be copied and used in worksheets or tests. I have one secretly installed for my students on my school computer. I’m old school when it comes to teaching students to graph -- those who go on to Math 12 can learn to use Graphing calculators then. However using Galc can help them discover how graphs change, proivdes them with a way to check their hand-constructed graphs, and I let them use it with word problems. It ranks as one of my favourite tools.
The last laughs . . .
