Author: Jon Orr

#MTBOS — Career Changing Community

by Jon Orr

The Exploring the MathTwitterBlogosphere Blog is gearing up for its blogging initiative starting in January. I signed up to be a mentor because I wanted to help out this amazing community of educators the way it helped me over the last few years.
Following this weird #MTBOS hashtag on twitter has changed my teaching practice in so many ways. The people are amazing and always willing to share a lesson or strategy or a desmos graph!!!

Through the hashtag I’ve collaborated on a few lessons with people from across the continent….Last year Michael Fenton and I worked on a Go Fish game for Trig Identities….and we debriefed with each other after each giving the lesson! That collaboration I find hard to do even just in my school or district!

I found it absolutely amazing when J.J. Martinez (Whom I’ve never met — but seems awesome) sent me a video showing his class’ reaction to revealing the answer to a task I created and shared.

Everyday I find amazing resources and connect with people through this community. I can’t believe I used to teach without the #MTBOS.

I found blogging and posting pictures of our classroom activities helped me keep focus on making everyday count for my students.
Here was my first post on starting my 180 Photos/Tweets routine..If you’re not sure what to blog about I would start that way. Just share a picture daily of what you’re doing in your room on Twitter. The blog ideas will follow!

Another post if you’re just starting on the #MTBOS and looking for lessons, resources or blogs is “Let’s Find A Good Math Lesson Online with #MTBOS.” I thought it was worthwhile to share the tech/organization side of finding and keeping good lessons/resources.

So head on over to the Exploring the MathTwitterBlogoSphere site and read their tasks, and keep reading the #MTBOS!

Boat in a River – Airplane version

by Jon Orr

Take a moment … What do you notice? What do you wonder?

Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 2.27.30 PM

Click to enlarge.

What could we do with this? Where could we go?

I saw this video today

It’s this video that made me think of creating the problem stated above. Did you notice in the original picture that the distances were the same? But the travel times were different? What was the speed of the plane? What was the speed of the wind?

Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 3.39.26 PM

Click to enlarge.

I then thought of these problems…

A super common problem we see in our Grade 10 Academic course here in Ontario. The first airplane problem and this motor boat problem have no real difference but opening up the problem by asking “What do you notice? What do you wonder?” allows us as a class to narrow down to the problem together. It allows us as a class to discuss why the flight times are different. The class feels like they had a hand in coming up with the math for the day.

See also Dan Meyer’s Boat in a River problem — it’s a beauty.

Match My Graph & Crowd Sourcing Challenges

by Jon Orr

Here’s a quick synapsis of an activity from my Advanced Functions class with transformations of trig functions.

We used a Custom Polygraph from Desmos to generate talk/discussion on key properties of trig functions (Students have previously dealt with trig functions in grade 11).

I overheard students asking questions about x-intercepts, period, and amplitude. Awesome!

We took a note on key properties of the sine function and cosine function (We ran out of time for Tangent). 

Let the struggle begin!

Students were then asked to work through this Match My Trig Function Activity built using Desmos’ Activity Builder.

Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 7.44.10 PM

Each slide is set up as a challenge. They are to write a sinusoidal function that “overlaps” the black target function. Students will have to use their memory or trial and error to discover how the parameters change the graph.

Watching the dashboard I can ensure their struggle is productive. I can jump in with feedback when I see they need it.

Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 7.46.23 PM

Here’s the best part, once they completed all 12 challenges they created their own trig function matching challenge and shared it out on a Padlet board. We had crowd sourced a bank of challenges to work through!  The students didn’t hold back either… They wanted to create hard ones to push their friends.

See the challenge – Live Board Below

Can’t see this board? Click here

That’s where class ended. When we came in the next day  and they all choose at least 5 peer challenges to complete…. And that’s when the taunting began!

To end it off we took a note based on their discoveries of how the parameters changed the graphs.

Click here to create your own Custom Activity Builder or here to create your own Padlet board.

 

 

Angular Velocity, Trig Whips & Elmo

by Jon Orr

The #MTBOS is an amazing group of dedicated generous teachers!! This lesson came together because teachers are happily sharing what they are doing!

Generating Curiosity!

Dan Meyer has a series of blog post on Developing the Question you need to read. In one example he uses this video below to spark student wonder and start a fight. I copied his plan on how to use the video to generate discussion on speed.
Show this video

Pause the video before the bike is revealed and have students wonder “What is going on here?, What could the dots be?” Let the video play and then ask them to rank the dots from fastest to slowest. This is where wonder will happen. Are dots B and C moving at the same speed? What do we mean by speed anyway? Enter angular velocity vs. linear velocity.
FullSizeRender 20

An Example for Linear Velocity vs. Angular Velocity

Show them this video obviously fake but fun video to generate some discussion.

Main Question we looked at together:How fast is the top swimmer moving when he hits the water? How fast is his angle changing? Before we calculate any of these we’ll go and experience the difference between the two.

Experience the Change

Bob Lochel has a great activity called Trig Whips where in groups of 4 students will experience the difference between angular velocity and linear velocity. Read about it!
A few pics and videos of our class Trig Whipping!

IMG_0027
Whole Class
IMG_0029

Consolidate

We came back in and summarized our findings from Bob’s handout. We made it clear that everyone had the same angular velocity but we all had different linear velocities. We turned our attention back to the diver video and determined the angular velocity and linear velocity of the top diver.

IMG_0033

IMG_0032

That’s where class ended! Tomorrow we’ll start off with….

Andrew Stadel’s Elmo Problem!

See all the resources from Andrew here
Tomorrow we’ll find Elmo’s ending position after the 1 minute, angular velocity and linear velocity.