In light of the recent earthquake in Haiti, it seems appropriate to offer up tools for teaching about the possibilities of natural disasters and preparations that can be done locally in our schools which may better prepare students for coping with the situation should it occur. To that end, the Red Cross has assembled their Masters of Disaster curriculum focused for students K-8.
BY BILL FERRIS
It’s that time of year again when lazy bloggers rehash old material under the guise of “Best of” lists rather than come up with new stuff. Instructify is no exception.
Below are the top 10 Instructify posts of 2009. The rankings were determined via a combination of Google Analytics, retweets, and the capricious and arbitrary whims of the editor.
BY BILL FERRIS
Welcome back from a long weekend. In this week’s by the numbers, we’ve got the answers to questions you’ll be asked in your next job interview, open-source ideas for educators, and some cool arithmetricks. Or, if you prefer, mathemagic. What’s that? You hate both of those puns? Fine, math tricks. Happy now?
Whatever you want to call them, you can read about them after the jump.
BY MELISSA THIBAULT
Picture this. You just finished teaching your third lesson on prime factors, photosynthesis or fractions, and there are some students who need more visuals and more practice. Wouldn’t it be great if you had free, quality-assured courseware in math, science, health, reading and keyboarding you could use to reinforce hard-to-grasp topics?
e-Learning for Kids, a global, nonprofit foundation, provides free courses for children ages 5 – 12, and is working to build a community for parents and educators to volunteer their expertise and share innovations and insights in childhood education. (more…)
BY BILL FERRIS
How far would your students go to save a lost pet? Would they infiltrate a nefarious underground factory that turns cuddly animals into food? Would they disguise themselves as monsters to outsmart gremlins, golems and yetis? Would they still go through all this rigmarole if they knew it was a way to practice their math skills?
Lure of the Labyrinth is an mathematics game from Maryland Public Television designed for middle-school pre-algebra students. The protagonist, a kid who’s just had his beloved pet abducted by Bigfoot and taken to a subterranean food mill, has to solve a series of math-based puzzles to get him back. The puzzles focus on proportions, ratios, fractions, and variables.
BY BILL FERRIS
Some kids love math. Some see it as a form of torture. Most are somewhere in between. If you’d like to reach out to students in the last two groups, consider using these five tools in class some time to help bridge the gap. I don’t teach math, but if I was still a student, these five would get me excited about math class.
BY BILL FERRIS
Check out these upcoming educational grants, as listed on Grant Wrangler.
Gladys Marinelli Coccia Awards — Deadline August 1
This award recognizes young (14 to 17-year-old) female social entrepreneurs who start enterprises for the common good. The winner receives $2,000 for the enterprise, travel, and access to social enterprise resources from Youth Service America.
If only Wolfram Mathworld had been around when I was banging my head against the wall trying to learn calculus, perhaps things would have been a lot easier. A predecessor of Wolfram Alpha, Mathworld lives up to its motto of being “The Web’s Most Extensive Mathematics Resource.” It’s a clearly thought out resource of mathematical terms, concepts, and visual references. Think of it like a math version of Wikipedia, but it’s not open to the public editing it. You can enter a concept in the search area, and it’s quite good at matching up the relevant information. Or you can use the left-side menu bar to navigate to your area of interest.
BY BILL FERRIS
For this month’s random roundup, we’ve selected the Library of Congress, our nation’s storehouse of pretty much everything worth knowing. As you’d expect, a lot of great resources for teachers have been derived from the Library. See your tax dollars at work by reading the articles linked after the jump.
BY BILL FERRIS
This week’s MBTN features the art of persuasion, common literary references, and $125,000-a-year teachers. More after the jump.
BY BILL FERRIS
“Back in my day we didn’t have those fancy calculators,” my dad used to say. “We had to use slide rules.” Which was his way of telling me he wouldn’t be much help with my math homework.
Sure, your math students are probably addicted to their TI-85s, smart phone apps, or online tools like Calc5, but sometimes it’s good to experiment with the tools of days gone by. Now you can make your own circular slide rule by following these directions from the physics department at the University of Montana.
Perform searches of computational knowledgeBY JASON DON FORSYTHE
WolframAlpha is an ambitious knowledge repository that functions similar to a web browser. It’s important to note the difference between a knowledge repository and a search engine — this isn’t a competitor to Google. In fact, it functions as a much different application. The concept is to show useful, relevant information based on your query, not give you a list of links to click on and find the information yourself. For example, if you enter a famous person it gives you a basic breakdown biography, more of a when, where, what response that would put important dates at your fingertips.
Looking for ideas or resources for your class? MIT Open CourseWare is there to help. Yes, the same MIT that everyone hopes their engineering-focused little one gets into has created a free and open resource for anyone in the world to use. It’s not just math and science courses either; MIT has published complete course resources for all the subjects they teach, from history to music and theater arts. (more…)
The early buzz about the world wide web was that it would throw open the floodgates of the world’s accumulated knowledge, creating a window into the cultures of the most far-flung places on earth. We instead got lolcats, pop-up ads, and meaningless quizzes about which superhero you are.
Fortunately, some wise folks had an eye on that original idyllic vision all along, and those folks now bring us the World Digital Library. A project of the Library of Congress and UNESCO, the site provides access to high-quality digital scans of primary source materials from all over the world.
These cultural treasures include maps, photographs, manuscripts, audio and video recordings and more, and there’s at least one item from every UNESCO member country. The WDL’s interface is phenomenal, offering beautiful, high-resolution scans with incredible zooming capability. Check out this 18th century Japanese woodblock print; you can zoom in close enough to see individual paper fibers.
The site is also exceptionally easy to navigate — perhaps dangerously so, if you like looking at pretty pictures and are prone to losing track of time. You can browse by place, time, topic, type of item, or contributing institution, and the site is navigable in seven different languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
The possibilities for using the WDL in the classroom are nearly endless: Social studies teachers, obviously, will find a treasure trove of primary source materials, but they can also show works created contemporaneously from around the globe for any era, enabling students to develop a holistic sense of global history. Second-language teachers can have students view culturally significant items in their target language. English language arts teachers can identify exquisite images, audio, and video for use as writing prompts. And the ability to browse by topic provides opportunities for use by those often-neglected STEM teachers: Among the topics to choose from is “natural science and mathematics,” which can be further limited to astronomy, geometry, medicine, physics, etc.
An entry under the topic “mathematical geography” is a 15th-century Egyptian book called A Guide for the Perplexed on the Drawing of the Circle of Projection. Many thanks to the World Digital Library for raising our collective IQ. This is what I always knew the internet could be. -EMILY JACK
Visit the Library of Congress online
Access Primary Sources Online with the Perseus Digital Library
The Career Awards for Science and Mathematics Teachers is a five-year award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund that rewards exceptional science or math teachers in North Carolina primary and secondary public schools. The Burroughs Wellcome Fund will support awards to five teachers, distributing $175,000 over a period of five years to eligible NC teachers. A bit of incentive for you? In addition to the teacher’s own recognition, the award allows for $10,000 of the award to purchase needed equipment and supplies for the winning teacher’s classroom or laboratory or be shared with the school or school district.
Do you have an incredible science or mathematics teacher working in your school? Nominations need to be put forth through the school principal, so if you are the principal you should write up a nomination. Several eligibility requirements are in play, so naturally you’ll want to check those out.
Are you a current or past student of an awesome science or math teacher? Nominations need to be put forth through the school principal, so you’ll need to sing your teacher’s praises to the principal and encourage them to submit a nomination. If anything, your unwarranted glowing feedback will at least give your teacher some bonus points with the principal.
Are you a science or math teacher? Perhaps you want to win this award. You might create a fake email account and then pretend to be a former student of an amazing science or math teacher. Now, here is the important part, you name yourself as that amazing teacher. You certainly play fast and loose with the ethics and morals, dude.
Start working on those applications right away — the application deadline is September 15, 2009. -NICK YINGLING
Career Awards for Science and Mathematics Teachers
Win a Nobel Prize…or at least pretend to
Get them to show you the money! Learn to write a winning grant proposal.
Photo credit: c.a.muller on Flickr.
moxie design studios
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