Tessellation Fascination

I’ve been challenged to come up with some interesting activities for my class next term.  I’ll be teaching all the Year 10 students not continuing with Maths next year.  The level of interest will be low, no doubt!!

I’ve been looking for some fun projects.  I love M.C. Escher’s art, so I’ve been exploring at the library, on the net …. and I found this great project on youtube.  I have to try it out!

Why blog?

It’s been a while since my last post – why?

Mainly, I’ve been concentrating on getting my head around teaching.  I’m into my second term and starting to get into the swing of things.  Now that the reality of teaching is setting in, I can pause to reflect. How is blogging going to contribute to my professional development? Is it worth the time? What am I trying to achieve?

I started catching up on the blogs I read and came across this post: Why do I blog? It was a great post reminding me of the benefits of blogging – even if no one reads my posts, it is a way of me developing professionally by reflecting on my own practice.

Hopefully, I can get back into it.

Using Twitter as professional development

I started using Twitter a few months ago as a way of keeping in touch with other teachers, particularly those interested in using new technologies in the classroom.

Twitter is a social networking tool that allows you to make a 140 character comment. You sign up and start making comments.  Doesn’t sound very exciting until you starting reading other people’s comments and they start reading yours.  To do this you choose people to “follow” which allows you to see their comments.  Similarly, other people choose to follow you to see what you have to say.

It has taken some time to build up a network.  At first I was only following about 10 people, mostly educators whose blogs I’d been reading.  Over time, I had a look at who those people were following, and added them to my list.  I now follow about 70 people.  These are mainly teachers, from all over the world.  Lots of them are maths teachers and many of them “tweet” about interesting links they’ve seen, Smartboard tools, classroom difficulties, etc.

So in this way I have a constant stream of educational conversation I can tap into.

Today I saw this tweet by David Sladkey: posted episode 51 of Teaching with Smartboard “Matching Pairs on the Smartboard”, followed by a link to the site. This looked interesting.  I’m new to using a Smartboard and I was just thinking I wanted to do a matching pairs game.  So I clicked on the link.

What a find – 50 teacher tube videos on using a smartboard – and each included Smartboard Notebook files I could download.

I watched episode 51.  I now know how to make a matching pairs game.  I have also made a random name generator for each of my classes.

Thank you David Sladkey and thank you Twitter.

New Scheme Teachers

Well, I am not a fan of paperwork so I was relieved to finish my application to join the NSW Institute of Teachers.  For those of you who don’t know, this is the professional body that all new teachers must join and become accredited with to teach in NSW.

The application involved filling in a multi-paged form, attaching certified copies of lots of documents (in my case passport, marriage certificate, academic transcripts, job offer letter and if I had them every job reference).  I had to write down my whole career history (reminds me of my age – 20 years worth – I’ve had a few different careers over that time).  Then the application had to be signed by me and witnessed by a member of the TAA (not quite sure what this is, but there was someone at my school who did it).

And now I can get started at becoming accredited.

If the application is anything to go by, there will be a bit of paperwork involved.

There are some positives to come out of the process. The lady at my school who checked over my application read through my career history and saw that I may be able to add value to the school in other ways than just Maths teaching.  With my recruitment experience I could get involved with careers advice, commerce etc.  So it was a nice bit of PR about me that wouldn’t have otherwise been known.

Also, I have been so busy just getting the hang of teaching, that although I have been reflecting a lot about my teaching practice, it has been in an unstructured way.  Becoming accredited will force me to structure my reflection, document it and cover all aspects of teaching, not just the parts I like.  Further, the process requires observation by a mentor, which I think will really help me as a beginning teacher.  My mentor commented that there was no mentoring in her first year which left her unsupported.

So although, accreditation at times seems like a whole lot of paperwork, I hope to make it work for me and make me a better teacher.

More videos for the classroom

Here are a couple of videos I’ve used in class over the last few weeks.  If YouTube is blocked at your school you can download the video using KeepVid.  You’ll just need a flash player like FLV player to play it back.

This one I used as an intro to Algebra. We had a short discussion on “Why learn Algebra?” and I pointed out that you need algebra to deal with equations and equations are used to describe what’s happening in the real world.  Hopefully this video helps to make the  link.  It also has some heavy duty equations in it, which can blow the students’ minds!

The next video is a neat explanation of the fundamental counting principle used in probability calculations and why it is easier than drawing a tree diagram.  I used it right after I introduced the principle and after we’d done tree diagrams.

Powers of ten

There hasn’t been much time in the last two weeks to use much new technology in class, but I did show this fabulous video to my Year 11 general class as an intro to teaching scientific notation (thank you to Paul Gray for finding it!).  Going to show it to my year 9s as well later on. I also showed my husband and kids who thought it was pretty cool too.

Enjoy!

Off and running with technology in the classroom

It’s only been two weeks but already I’ve had the chance to use lots of technology in the classroom.  Here’s a snippet of what I’ve been doing.

Tinkerplots is a great educational software package for exploring data.  I’ve been using it to introduce cumulative frequency and box plots.  It’s not free, unfortunately, but it gives great visuals for playing with data and getting a feel for data.

I used a short video as an intro to budgeting (WindowsMedia)  (here for RealVideo), as well as an interactive budget planner that is aimed at high school students.  Gave the students something real to relate budgeting to.

I used the Smartboard for the first time.  Had fun making Notebook files with diagrams already drawn and then doing the working in class and then saving it all!!  The students enjoyed writing on the Smartboard.  We also played some good games: a shapes matching game and a great game called broken calculator both at the subtangent site.  You have to download these games, and there are several more at this site I’m yet to explore.

Also a couple of applets on calculating arc length and area of a sector.

If you want to see other sites I’ve been tagging, you can check out my delicious bookmarks – I’m taniak13 on delicious.

Drawing the Golden Spiral

I wanted to use a picture of the Golden Spiral for my avatar on Twitter and after finding a few on Flickr wasn’t sure what the copyright issues were – how do you credit it?  So I decided: why not make my own?

My first thought was to use a graphing tool like Autograph or Graphmatica. After a bit of research I found a great derivation of the equation of the Golden Spiral, which in polar coordinates r (length) and @ (angle) is r=a x phi^(2@/pi) where pi is 3.141… and phi is 1.618… and a is a constant.

Next idea was to construct an approximation to the Golden Spiral using Fibonacci squares.  I used GeoGebra because I need to learn it as it is being used at the school I’m starting at this year.  Here it is:

Maths Symbols in Word 2007

There were two great posts on the MathsClass blog on shortcuts when writing equations in Word – one for PCs and the other for Macs, but I use Word 2007 (on a PC), which is completely different!!

So I created my own cheat sheet.

One of the really good features of the new equation editor in Word 2007 is being able to write equations in linear style and it automatically converts them to professional style – so you type x^2 and it converts to a nice looking superscript.

The other feature is Math AutoCorrect which has a heap of keystroke sequences which will automatically convert to a symbol e.g. to get the symbol for pi, type \pi.  The neat thing about this is that you can customise the autocorrect options, although this isn’t so good if you use several different computers (e.g. at work/home).

You can download the cheat sheet here (in Word 2007) word-2007-shortcuts-maths-cheat-sheet. 

Or if you have Word 2003 have a look at it here word-2007-shortcuts-maths-cheat-sheet-w2003.

LAMS Conference

I know this post is a bit overdue, since I attended the 3rd International LAMS & Learning Design Conference on December 5th, 2008,  but I’ll claim the end of year chaos of Christmas parties and NYE as taking over my life.

Having spent some time learning and using LAMS for an assignment at uni, I thought it was a great tool and I was interested to see how it was being used in the “real world”, i.e. in schools.  One of my concerns was how LAMS can be implemented in high schools and, in particular, I was sceptical of schools IT capabilities to support it.  I was engouraged by two presentations given by Jarrod Johnson and Peter Cheel from Pedare Christian College in South Australia. 

Jarrod and Peter have really used LAMS in exciting ways – firstly as a way of managing a large scale student project, and secondly to deliver an online forensics course.  It was great to see LAMS used on a large scale basis (+300 users) and gain an understanding of how the IT department enabled this to happen. I also gained an appreciation of how much work it took to write all the LAMS sequences, but the results were fantastic.

In my new school this year,  I don’t think I’ll get a chance to use LAMS since it’s my first year out and I think I’ll need to focus on the basics of teaching maths. But LAMS has opened my eyes to some innovative ways of teaching using the web, which I think is the way of the future.

Check out Madhu’s post on the conference too.