Dot Physics- Wired magazine

I sent this article to a math whiz soccer player from my Precalculus class. She was as excited as you would expect to be sent an article about math over the summer. It involves using vectors, dot products, and contour mapping to determine where to place a wall of players during a free kick. Fascinating stuff, and easy enough to understand for Precal or advanced Geometry students.

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/angular-size-of-a-soccer-goal/

Who pays how much?

That's a whole lot of logos. This would be a fun, open-ended exercise, to see how much the ad space would cost. Some possible questions: How many times is each logo shown?   How does his posture effect the brand exposure? How long is the press conference?
This would be a good PBL task too.

Desmos you complete me

Throughout the year I will no doubt be posting a lot about Desmos. What is Desmos? I can't really tell you. It's basically an online tool that consolidates a lot of the programs that have existed for a while: Geogebra, mathopenref, Ti-nspire, even your TI-83. It allows students to assign sliders that manipulate values of mother functions. There are different exploration activities built in, similar to Ti-nspire lessons. There are ways to monitor student graphs and give feedback. Desmos is one of the reasons I am so hyped for 1:1, and I will no doubt be posting about it a great deal throughout the year.

What is a knowledge management system?

This is basically a hub for the dissemination of information. A place to post, grade, and pace assignments, it is essentially the engine that makes a 1:1 classroom go. The one that seems to be used by the majority of the teachers at my new school is Canvas. You can arrange assignments by module and make progression through said modules dependent on assessment data. You can embed youtube videos and google drive links into assignments, which is helpful. For math peeps, there is an equation editor but uploading pictures or pdfs is probably the most efficient method of putting math problems on the module. Here's a module I put together in about 3 minutes.

I will be collecting your hyphy vocab quizzes by the end of this post.

The new digs

To my Bruins, I'm sorry. This was an opportunity too good to pass up. Big ups to Mide Macaulay for adding me to the team.

The school is located in downtown Los Angeles. The school is currently 1:1, meaning on Chromebook laptop per child. The classes follow a "blended learning" model, which has even led experienced educators to give me confused looks. This summer has been a process of trying to wrap my head around what that means, and what it looks like in a secondary 1:1 environment. This video might help:

What this will probably look like in my classroom: Student walks in. Student opens up laptop and logs onto knowledge management system (more on this later). Student completes "Do Now", which is a mix of foundational skills and the previous lesson's material. Based on their performance, they will be arranged into groups for remediation, review, or they will move on to an online lesson constructed by yours truly. They will eventually log on to an online curriculum source that will give them the feedback, error correction, and practice they need. Eventually they will progress to group work where they will be asked to apply the concepts to some sort of performance task or writing task.

What will I be doing? Probably working with the groups who got the "Do Now" wrong for the majority of the time. I think. This will probably change quite a bit throughout the year.

So I started a blog. I will be posting about instructional technology, math and science education, education policy, and all that #teacherlyfe business. I will begin work at a school that has a blended learning approach, so the first few months of my blog will focus on the process of adapting my approach to this model.