New Season of the Math Teachers Lounge

While I shared this podcast last year, for all my K-12 math friends,  you might want to revisit the Math Teachers Lounge.  Hosted by Bethany Lockhared Johnson and Dan Meyer- this is all math, all the time.  And this year they have added study guides (available here). You can access the podcast here or in your favorite podcast app. Here is the Spotify link as well as Apple podcasts.

Instead of math timed tests

Alice Keeler (math teacher extraordinaire) shares her ideas (and research) on techniques to replace the dreaded timed tests  Please read her post here.

Looking for Math materials?

Then check out the math channels on Discovery Education.  You can either sign into your account (and then search for Math and filter for Channels) or use the link here (you will be prompted to sign in). From simulations, challenges, strategies, and connections- there is something for everyone.

Charts and Hearts- Perfect Together

Eric Curts has shared a Valentines' themed math activity.  You can read all about Hearts and Charts (and get your copy of the spreadsheet) here.

Need to roll a die (or two?)

Alice Keeler shares her suggestions on online dice (you can the number of dice and even the sides) here.

This makes so much sense

In her recent blog post, Alice Keeler talks about decomposing fractions in student work.  How great would it be if students learned the why and not just a rote set of rules (that’s where I am).  What do you think?

The Greedy Pig

When I first read this math post from Alice Keeler, I saw it as a math game (you can probably tell I never taught math and probability was always the last chapter in the book and got very little time!). 

But The Greedy Pig is a chance to put probability into play.  One die is rolled and everyone records it. You continue to add on the next 4 rolls (unless a 1 is rolled- then everyone loses their points). Yet you can elect to stop at any point. 

While Alice offers a Google Slides Add in (something that would be hard to do in school), I think the game works just as well without it.  Be sure to see the link (in the first paragraph) with some suggestions on strategy.

Math and Skittles- perfect together!

Eric Curts has recently shared a self-checking Google Sheet activity with Skittles.  It covers estimating, counting, graphing, and more!  Please click here for his post.

New Math Podcast

If you teach math, you might be interested in a new Math podcast series sponsored by Amplify. Geared to the K-12 math educator, it focuses on current classroom topics.  The last podcast discussed building fluency in mathematics.  Each session is about 40 minutes. You can find current and past podcasts at the Math Teachers Lounge (here is the site)

For math teachers

In his blog post in Edutopia, Ranjani Iyer shares her secrets for teaching high school math. She outlines several classroom techniques to help engage and motivate her students.

Black History in Math Class

This was an interesting article from Middle Web from Mona Iehl.  I can relate to her desire to show students the wide range of mathematical talent and more importantly, that they are represented in that group.  She offers several suggestions to merge cultural awareness with math.

Holiday Math in Google Sheets

Eric Curts has shared a 12 Days of Christmas Math activity in Google Sheets.  Please see his post here.

Magic Math

 

Some might argue that all math is magic- but here are some end-of-the-year activities to help your students review.  Please see the blog post by Katheleen Palmieri (at Middle Web) for suggestions.

Math Reps

You might know this practice as spiral or distributed learning.  It offers additional practice to help students strengthen core skills. Think of it as an entrance ticket. While researching Edu Protocols (more on that in a future post), I came across this brief video from Stephanie Howell as well as Wakelet of resources.  There is also a Facebook group.

The best math whiteboard ever!

 Math Whiteboard is a free collaborative whiteboard. Graphing will never be the same!  You can even embed videos on the page- and I love that everything (the math, drawing, text, and the graph) is all on one screen. There are even sliders where you can change the values and watch the graph change.

 

While you cannot assign them to students, like slides, you can have multiple pages and have each student work on their own page (and the teacher can see all the work).  There is no turn-in function. 

 

I watched the recording from Eric Curts recently. While the demo is done with a touch screen, you can also type (see the onscreen keyboard at about 41 mins).

 

Here were my highlights:

• creates graphs and then provides a slider to change the values. (8 mins)  

• creates animations (related rates problem at 11 mins.)

• equivalent features would help students in solving problems (things that are equivalent appear in the same color- from fractions to steps in solving an equation. I think this could be a great homework tool). (25 min)

 

I’m sure those with math talents will see many more applications. Special thanks to Lauren Buonpane and Mary Kruh for test driving this site and sharing their feedback.

Kami and the equation editor

I asked Mary Kruh and Lauren Buonpane (both from the high school) to explore the equation feature in Kami.  Below are their comments. If you would like a quick tutorial from Kami, please see the video here.

• The Equation feature is intuitive.
• If you type as you would type in Desmos or as you would type in a message where you did not have math-editing features, it reformatted the equation nicely. For example, I typed "x^2+5x=0" and Kami formatted the equation so the exponent was in the right spot, the variables were italicized, and the spacing was pleasing to the eye.
• For anyone in the math field who has used a Word document to create assignments, Kami's equation editor is very similar.   There are small if any learning curves when it comes to typing equations which is great! 
• For a teacher who teaches higher-level math, when you hit Equation and then the Pi symbol, there are many great options.
• If you hit the integral symbol, it puts in the integral symbol with spaces for the upper and lower bounds.
• If you hit the summation symbol, capital sigma appears with spaces for the upper and lower limits of summation.
• If you hit "log", "log" appears with a space for the base.
• If you hit "lim" for limit, "lim" appears with "n-->∞" underneath, but that can be edited to anything you want.
• The square root and nth root symbols work as expected as does the fraction symbol (horizontal fraction bar). A degree symbol is there, lots of Greek letters, inequality symbols, etc. are there.
• So, while we have not used Kami with my students, we know that the Kami Equation feature seems to be easy to use and has things that would satisfy teachers of higher-level math, too.

Jamboard and Open Middle Math

Jamboard image by Alice Keeler

Alice Keeler shares an interesting Jamboard application (and you could do it in Kami as well) for helping students work with open ended math problems.  The site, Open Middle (despite its name) has math resources for grades K-12.  

Please see her complete blog post here.

Math Manipulatives

Sarah Keifer recently shared a blog post on Virtual Manipulative.   Please read it here.  The site she shares is Didax Virtual Manipulatives.  While you can purchase from the site, all the virtual manipulatives are free!

Show me the answers (50 math problems)

Special thanks to Kayla Hughey (from the Facebook group Teachers Teaching With Tech) for this interactive slide deck.  Maybe a copy and decide which ones to assign to your students.  Click here to make a copy of Kayla’s work and let the math begin!

Math in Pictures

Those of you who know me have realized that I am a very visual learner (and it must be genetic- ask me about my daughter in the brownie aisle at Wegmans!).  This blog post by Kristen Acosta from Edutopia has several ideas for using images in math (at various grade levels).