#70Days: Clicking on Resources 6

22/70

Devotional phrase:  "to the praise of his glory!"

Everything takes place "to the praise of his glory."  "Praise" is grateful celebration.  "Glory" is the bright presence of God.  This is our destiny, this is what we are made for: a grand celebration in the full presence of God.  Praise and glory. (Peterson, Practice Resurrection)

Life really isn't about two categories - the secular and the spiritual.  Instead it's about the one life, the unified life, the life that glorifies God moment by moment.  And so in my teaching, purpose is to glorify God while illuminating the concepts and the beauty of mathematics.  No, I don't preach or teach scripture ... but all that I do, I do to his glory!

This morning I have so many tabs open ... so much fun to click through resources.  It all started with this tweet ... early this morning ...

I wanted to see how "crowdsourcing" was used in this context.  The tweet took me to a new blogger - Making Math Visual - adding her to my list!  The activity she described illlustrated exponential functions using dice, google spreadsheet, and geogebra ... all tools that interest me!

Next I noticed Shelley has a virtual filing cabinet - always intriguing!  And from there I found two more resources to share this morning. The first one I read was Seven (Sneaky) Activities To Get Your Students Talking Mathematically. The ideas shared, card sorts, odd man out, truthiness (always, sometimes, never) prompted me to want to explore my first unit of instruction to see which of those activities would fit best!  The other resource coincided with both blogs ... Swan's document, Improving learning in mathematics:
challenges and strategies, where I will spend some time today reading!

A second tweet sent me on another adventure.  Notice the article is about asking the right questions ... an interest of mine ... but the catchy part ... "in the right way!"

So I had to read that article and I highly recommend it!  One idea that caught my attention is this:  One way to make questions suitable for any student is to pose them in a way that allows students to engage with the question at a number of different levels. For example, rather than asking students to answer a math question, the teacher could pose two questions of differing difficulty on the board and ask, "Which of these two questions is harder and why?" The ensuing discussion will raise all the important mathematical issues that the teacher needs to cover, but the question has been posed in an inclusive way that enables more students to contribute, thus supporting differentiated instruction.

You would think that's enough clicking for one morning but I have to tell you about 2 more!

I noticed someone new followed me on Twitter this morning ... and being the curious sort, I clicked on his profile and went to his website.  I haven't read the first chapter available yet, but the title of his book makes me want to explore more:  The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion.

Last, Mary, at Curiouser and Curiouser suggested a resource that she is planning to explore with students in the coming year.  It's called Exploding Dots!  Check it out ... if you teach place value the first lessons are invaluable! That's  as far as I previewed today ... looking forward to watching more his videos!

Dark clouds in the sky ... might be a great day for reading/studying/planning!