The first site, http://www.101qs.com/, uses images and video to spark interest in students and is an idea I've already begun to incorporate into my classroom. Below are a few images from the site:
This set-up for a lesson is interesting to me because depending on the student and the question that comes to mind a lesson could go a lot of different directions. That's exciting to me because it seems that it'd be more natural (and less mechanical) to start lessons this way and to let the interest of students lead lessons toward a learning objective that students want to learn and, of course, is based in math.
For example, in my geometry class we have a circles unit coming up after Christmas where using the candy cake picture could get students interested in learning about circumferences. I also think back to the start of the school year with my algebra II students when we covered arithmetic and geometric sequences that when I teach that again in the future it'd be neat to have the candy cake picture and have students figure out an equation for the number of candies in each circle and if it's a geometric or arithmetic sequence. With the pennies picture I'm thinking of a unit after Christmas on squares and cubes where this would be interesting to use to spark student interest.
I also looked at the website http://www.estimation180.com/ and it seems like a really neat way for students to gain an understanding of estimating distance, time, size, etc. in a very practical way. We are just finishing a unit in geometry on trigonometric definitions with right triangles and I noticed that when I told students to round to one decimal many students didn't know how to round. I'm planning to do a lesson on rounding for all my classes after Christmas and it'd be neat also to include a few of these problems from Estimation 180 to ease students back into school after the long break.
No comments:
Post a Comment