Instructify

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

I often use stories and analogies to help my students understand what another place or another time would be like. This has the most impact when I can present facts to back up my story. If It Were My Home provides just that by generating statistical comparisons between two places.

The site was first created to show the scale of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill by superimposing the contaminated area over a location of your choice. If It Were My Home has since expanded to include a fabulous country comparison tool. Choose a country and you get, “If ___ were your home instead of the United States…” followed by social and economic comparisons based on data from the CIA World Factbook. By default it uses the United States, but you can compare any two countries. The page also includes a short description of the country and an Amazon-generated list of suggested books. Just glancing at the titles gives an idea of the country’s identity; for Russia it displayed books about Stalin, the Cold War, and the transition from communism. The comment section on each country’s page adds an interesting social element, but beware inappropriate posts.

For English or social studies teachers, this is a compelling way to show students the facts of life in other parts of the world. The country comparisons also offer opportunities for math classes working with fractions and proportions. And you can still check out the original page about the Gulf oil spill. If you and your students were so lucky, you’ll be thankful that it was not your home.

If It Were My Home

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More information than you’ll ever need about every country: CIA World Factbook

BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

I was never any good at math, and one of the major factors was that it took me a few repetitions to understand the concepts behind a given mathematical principle. I had great teachers, but alas they couldn’t hold up the class for 10 minutes to explain the quadratic formula AGAIN to a struggling me. If I’d only had a collection of instructional videos that explain the concepts to me with visual aids that I could watch repeatedly I might have been the next Stephen Hawking (well, okay, maybe I could just balance my checkbook effectively).

Enter Teacher Zone Math Videos, the self-proclaimed “most comprehensive library of math video lessons on the planet.” Once you sign up for your free membership you have total access to the library. Teacher Zone has videos for grades 3 through 8, as well as algebra 1, algebra 2, and geometry. The videos are well done and take advantage of illustrative visual aids to explain mathematical concepts.

One factor worthy of note — the videos are hosted via YouTube, so if your school district is still blocking YouTube you might need a workaround.

Teacher Zone Math Videos

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Mathematics visualized at Khan Academy

VideoScience: Another aptly named website

Educational videos, organized, at WatchKnow

BY KEVIN HODGSON

We run into this all the time in our school — a student understands a new math concept while sitting there in the classroom, but when they get home to continue their homework on the same concept…they go completely blank. Teachers can’t be on call all day long, but there are a number of websites out there that students can turn to for help. Algebra.help is one such place to turn. Basic in design, the site is rich with lessons, worksheets, calculators, and more. Its focus, obviously, is on algebraic equations, and this overview of algebra is a helpful place for struggling students to begin.

Knowing that word problems are often an area of difficulty for my own students, I checked out the link for the word problem tutorial. It nicely walked me through how to approach a word problem that deals with algebra. I also thought the worksheets were helpful as tutorials, given that the user has to solve a problem but can also turn to the “step by step” calculator.

Algebra.help

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Mathematics visualized at Khan Academy

BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

As if the end of holiday break isn’t enough of a bummer, January also means semester exams for many secondary teachers. And despite our efforts to write fair exams, sometimes the grades just don’t turn out as we think they will. Should we use a curve? If you’re looking to make such an adjustment, a math blog called Division by Zero offers a complete guide to curving exam grades.

We may think of curving as something for college professors, and while the blog author is exactly that, the technique is certainly useful at the secondary level, too. Before detailing the process, it starts with a thoughtful introduction about when and why we might consider curving exam grades. There follows an explanation of 10 different ways to curve (eight serious and two humorous), including the pros and cons of each method. It’s an excellent overview that will leave you with plenty of options should your students not quite produce the grades you expect.

For lovers of math, the blog offers plenty of other interesting topics, but this guide would be useful for teachers of any subject. However, in deciding when and how to curve, I’ll echo the blog author’s advice: “Use your judgment. You know the class, and you know the material.”

Then again, there’s always this approach. Happy grading!

How to curve an exam and assign grades

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Jennifer Wagner’s Projects by Jen is a valuable resource for preschool through 6th grade teachers to engage in inquiry projects with other classrooms.  These projects are conducted through the use of high- and low-tech tools for sharing information among classrooms and teachers.

Wagner notes on her site that she has hosted about 60 different collaborative projects over the years and the topics run from counting Oreo cookies (a math project) to a community service venture. Her projects often cross over into several disciplines, but most involve sharing of data and then analysis of that data. A few years ago, my classroom was part of a greeting-card project, in which we sent out greeting cards to a handful of other classrooms and then received cards in return. We then tracked the cards we received on a classroom map.

Wagner also has a newsletter that features collaborative ideas (this costs a small fee), highlights classroom websites and teachers, and more. There is no cost for participation in Wagner’s various collaborative projects, so it provides a nice, easy way to expand learning beyond classroom walls. She also has a very neat ongoing venture called Guess the Wordle, which is a daily brain game using a word cloud and a question. Guess the Wordle is an interesting morning activity to get the day started. Some days, the answer might be a book. Other days, it might be a math problem. Or, as in the case of this one, it is the ingredients of a recipe — but for what?

Projects by Jen

Guess The Wordle

BY AARON FOWLES

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you weren’t the greatest math student. The earlier math classes may not have been that hard, but Algebra 2 threw you through a loop. The teachers tried and tried with their overhead projector to make the problems spring to life, but nothing worked.  You just couldn’t picture it.

For the modern student, enter Khan Academy. This site and accompanying Youtube channel contain more than 1,800 short videos on topics mathematical, biological, chemical, and even historical.

It’s hard to sufficiently describe the wealth of knowledge hidden in these videos. Even harder to describe than the content of the videos is the creator, Salman Khan. Operating out of a closet in his home, Khan cranks out videos at breakneck pace using a simple tablet and display program. Khan Academy’s screencasts are picking up fans across the world, including Bill Gates.

Besides the videos, khanacademy.org also has self-paced and instantly graded practice activities that measure a learner’s mastery of the content. The results of these activities can be stored and accessed at a later time, making Khan Academy a great resource for teachers who want to develop a picture of a student’s progress.

Khan Academy

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Watch kid-friendly videos with Kideo Player

Find quality science multimedia content at Nature.com

Educational videos, organized, at WatchKnow

BY AARON FOWLES

Math can be a very esoteric subject. It’s difficult for students to conceptualize numbers that are disassociated from their daily existence. Word problems have mixed success with making these concepts tangible to students. It’s necessary, then, to find a way to make these ideas “real” for students by providing them with something they can see and, if possible, touch. Virtual manipulatives are just that. They are computer programs that give students virtual objects to move around, measure, and arrange in mathematically meaningful ways. Rather than just providing students with an initial graphic that they must then mentally change, virtual manipulatives provide the means to make those thought processes tangible and apparent.

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives, hosted by Utah State University, is a collection of Java tools that explore mathematical concepts. The activities are divided by grade level and subject matter. The 6-8 Algebra section, for example, shows activities that teach algebra through the use of balance scales. The example in the picture above shows how to develop equations based on geometrical configurations.

The activities are based on Java, and sometimes making Java work on your computer is an exercise in patience. It is well worth it, though, since these activities can help students visualize math and teachers visualize students’ understanding.

These tools are well-suited for use with an interactive whiteboard or on student computers.  Each activity is aligned to nationally recognized math standards and includes instructions.

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

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Try some interactive learning at Learner.org

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Inspired by President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign, the National STEM Video Game Challenge aims to motivate interest in STEM learning by tapping into students’ natural passions for playing and making video games.

The exact evaluation criteria is not completely clear, except for this explanation:

Submissions will be judged on a combination of fun and balanced game play, creative vision and incorporation of STEM concepts in game design and play experience. Paper-based game designs will be judged separately from playable games.

There are two levels of competition: a middle school (grades 5-8) program and a program for younger designers (pre-K through grade 4), with prizes ranging from laptops for the schools to game-design tools for students. I like how the site lays out the rationale for bringing gaming into the classroom with this competition (which runs through the course of the school year) and also why they are focusing on middle school students. All the games must be aligned with the National Science Educational Standards and the Common Core standard for Math (more information about that is here).

In addition to backing from the White House, this competition is sponsored by a series of big-name technology companies, including Microsoft, AMD and more.

If you are interested, visit their application page.

STEM Video Game Challenge

Additional resources

Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health by Ann My Thai, David Lowenstein, Dixie Ching, and David Rejeski

Moving Learning Games Forward by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, and Katie Salen

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

At Interactives at Learner.org, you will find interactive activities in the content areas of math, science, language arts, history, and the arts. Within each activity there is a combination of text, animations, pictures, and interactive material. I used this one on the rock cycle with my students last year.

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BY BILL FERRIS

During the entire month of June, your students can access CarrotSticks for free. As Jason reported in April, CarrotSticks normally only lets kids play addition mode for free. For the next few weeks elementary learners can also practice their subtraction, multiplication, geometric proofs, and division. It could be a fun way to promote some educational fun instead of TV.

CarrotSticks

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Sharpen your math skills with CarrotSticks

BY BILL FERRIS

Energy use feels like an amorphous concept — unlike a fast-food transaction in which I know that five dollars gets me a third of a pound of artery-clogging goodness, it’s tough to visualize just how much leaving the living-room lights on all nights will cost me. General Electric has created a slick energy-awareness app that shows you how much each appliance costs you. Not just in terms of money, either. It shows kilowatt consumption, gasoline consumption, as well as showing how much use you can get out of a single kilowatt.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

If you’re like me, you remember with fondness long nights with your friends, your trusty plastic icosahedron, pencils and paper, and junk food. I’m talking about Dungeons and Dragons of course, the game many of us geeks played when we were younger and had a lot more time on our hands. At one point blamed by pundits and media outlets as a bad influence on children, D&D is now making inroads in libraries and touting its value toward teaching children problem solving, teamwork, and mathematics and reading skills.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Back in my day, it was Math Blaster! for our classes’ Apple IIe, and I couldn’t get enough. But these days, client side games are so 2000s — everything is browser-based as internet connectivity becomes more universal. Such is the case with the free-to-play, internet-based CarrotSticks. It’s a pretty straightforward math game that rewards players for correctly answering mathematical questions of varying difficulties.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Let me just say it: I love PBS. From the documentaries, to the quality children’s programming, it’s one of my favorite channels to watch. But my love of Cookie Monster aside, did you know that PBS had developed a top-notch web resource for teachers? If the answer was no, then you owe it to yourself and your students to spend a planning period looking at the PBS Teachers website.

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BY BILL FERRIS

NASA eClips presents lots of great videos that STEM teachers in any grade level will find useful. Through several examples of applied science and math, kids will get a sense of the cool stuff they can do by studying the sciences.

Want to see how NASA made Michael Phelps’ swim suit so fast? Wonder what astronauts do to stay in shape in space? How about checking out if anybody’s at home on Mars? NASA eClips explores these and lots of other areas, churning out new videos each week during the school year. (more…)