OK I’m home sick and feeling slightly delirious, hence my watching of nerdy Youtube Maths videos.

The animation on this one is great and it has the Base 8 part which is the best bit!!

This is one of my favourite Tom Lehrer songs with a great video to go with it.

It’s really more sciency than maths, but I love it anyway.

What’s Special About This Number? is a great site with lots of interesting information for those of you who enjoy number facts.

watch letters and numbers online

Letters and Numbers is a great show airing on SBS at 6pm weekdays.

It is based on the British show Countdown, which in turn was based on the French game Des chiffres and des lettres.

My kids love to watch it and we even named our cat after Lily Serna, the maths expert on the show.

I’ve used this version of the game, Numbers and Letters from the subtangent website,  in class which is available to download and play offline.

I watched this great video of Dan Meyer speaking about teaching Maths. It’s been making the rounds on twitter, the AAMT (Australian Maths teachers) email list I subscribe to and I even got an email from my friend, Madhu, encouraging me to watch it.

It’s a great video, really illustrating the difference between “good” teaching and “bad” in my view. In good teaching, we are teaching students to think for themselves and understand the concepts first, rather than simply teaching students to follow a set of procedures to get the right answer.

Teaching is an exciting challenge.

 I saw this blog post that looked fun about using Word it out – like Wordle only better.  So I used it to make a Word Cloud from all the words on my blog.  I like the editing features – you can remove words, change colours etc.

I was reading a Betchablog post on creating a wordle picture of your own blog.  Here’s mine:

I wonder what it will look like in a year?

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!

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.

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.