Mimi has a post about a great lesson focused on the details of solving algebra problems, and catching and understanding errors. She’s taken a lot of great ideas and combined them into a fabulous lesson. You should go take a look!
Amy Gruen at square root of negative one teach math has found a way to teach piecewise defined functions that worked for her students. This is a really difficult skill for a lot of students, so this is a totally awesome lesson to read about–go read it!
As requested, here is a link to the Google Art Project, where you can explore some famous museums. Also see Google Maps’ Street View feature for more fun.
The following is a link to a TI 83 Emulator. You must download the vti.zip file, unzip it, then open the .exe file. Enjoy!
As I was just clicking on links I stumbled across this cool way to convert units of measurement on the blog approaching infinity. http://approachinfinity.blogspot.com/2009/12/converting-units-of-measurement-using.html When I was in Middle School I had trouble understanding how to convert from one unit to the other. I eventually just memorized how to do that without learning any trick […]
Completing the square is hard because it has a lot of small steps that have to be put together, and it’s hard to remember what you’re doing unless you understand it well (and you practice). Sam Shah at Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere shared his successful strategy for teaching this. It doesn’t look flashy, but […]
I have become a great Kate Nowak fan since discovering her blog f(t) a few months ago. You’ll probably notice this as a theme in my posts in the next few weeks. Anyhoo… she shared her most recent strategy for introducing logs (I think you’ll like it–it might be as good as the Casci swoosh). […]
Sometimes when you are teaching something the first time–or even the second–you want a really concrete way of showing what’s going on. I really love how Carolyn’s lesson on factoring polynomials using fractions tiles worked (go read it right now!). There are two things I see that made the lesson work really well: one is […]
Fractions are the bane of every middle school and high school teacher’s existence, I think. Adrienne Stuckey of Education Adaptations writes that a lot of the students she works with are at a disadvantage because they don’t know their multiplication facts well enough to make factoring easy. (You notice this problem when students are learning […]