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Sunday, January 4, 2015

New Year's Resolutions

A couple of quick New Year's Resolutions for my classroom and @BHSGeometry...

1.  Focus on highlighting the standards of mathematical practice.  We use many of them every day in class.  Are the students aware of this?


2.  Less telling, more doing.  Force the students to do the heavy lifting in class.  This is always a goal of mine, and always a challenge to meet.


3.  More student self-reflection.  The more students reflect, the more that gets transferring into long-term memory.  Google forms, exit tickets, possibly student blogs... we'll see where 2015 takes us!







Saturday, January 3, 2015

Google Earth in Geometry

We recently finished our unit on triangle centers in geometry.  Students were asked to do a lot of discovery / investigative learning with Geometer's Sketchpad (GSP).  

One activity we had students do was get into groups of three and using Google Earth and GSP, find the location that is equidistant to all three of their houses.

For most, this was a great way to have students collaborate and have direct meaning to the geometry involved in the lessons.  We saw some excellent sketches, such as the example below.





Google Earth is a very useful tool for this type of task.  We found it more user friendly than Google maps since Earth allows the user to pin more than two locations at a time.