MathsClass

The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers (AAMT) recently created a web-site called “You Can Do Maths”.  From the site:

The youcandomaths campaign encourages all young people and their families to appreciate the important role mathematics plays in many careers and everyday life.

An embarrassing, and slightly funny, example of why Mathematics is important (in this case, being able to read a calendar).

This post is my entry to Dan Meyer’s contest My Annual Report II.

Going into school today, I was looking forward to seeing a new digital projector and Interactive Whiteboard installed in my classroom.

There are a couple of previously published resources on this site that might help you out as you prepare for the new school year.

Another good video from The Common Craft Show.  This one is on Borrowing Money.

Recently Dan Meyer posted his thoughts on the ideal maths textbook, which would actually be a digital archive of very interesting mathematical media.  This is a great idea, and whilst I don’t have a projector in my classroom yet (although fingers-crossed), it would be something that I would buy/subscribe to.  Anyway, there was a challenge in this for me: being mindful of the media I consume and the world around me to collect digital bits and pieces that might help explain a mathematical concept (I commented on Dan’s blog that I missed the opportunity to take a picture of 3m³ of dirt I had delivered).  The second, to my mind harder, challenge is to take that item and make a meaningful and engaging connection with a concept being taught in class.

Continuing my review of teaching in 2008.

As I was putting together a lesson on using conversion graphs, I couldn’t find a nice temperature conversion graph - so I created one.

This video from The Common Craft Show is an excellent “introduction to the magic of compound interest and how it helps money grow over time”.  Keep an eye out for more videos in their financial basics series.

In my post Thinking about 2008 I noted four things to improve my teaching in 2008, here I review how I did.

Creating a maths worksheet in Microsoft Word without using the proper symbols does not present well – I’m sure you’ve seen 2 * 2 = 4 or 2 x 2 = 4 rather than 2 × 2 = 4.  My previous post, Maths symbols in Word is one of the most popular on this site.  In that post, I gave shortcuts for inserting mathematical symbols into Word - the post was specific to the Windows version of Word.  As I’ve been a Mac user for a year, it’s time to make a similar post for Mac users.

I’m currently sorting through the many teaching blogs I subscribe to, trying to cull the list.  The thing about Maths related blogs that tends to keep them in the list is that Maths teachers generally write more practical posts.

Here’s a video about the history of number, in particular the numbers 0 and 1.  Our Year 7 program begins the year looking at ancient number systems, so this video will fit in nicely.