engagement

4 Ways To Use Two Truths & One Lie in ANY Math Class.

by Jon Orr

Two truths and one lie in math class has taken math class discussions and math arguments to a whole new level! They are the main event when it comes to math fights!

Watch the video post:

Not into watching the video? No problem, read the transcript below.
Continue reading →

My Favourite Desmos Feature

by Jon Orr
If you follow me you know Desmos is my go-to software for graphing and calculator functions with my students. I'm pretty excited to let you know that coming soon I'll release a 3 part video series on using Desmos in the classroom to enhance classroom discussions. To get started I wanted to share my favourite Desmos feature: The Moveable Point Watch the 1 min 44 second video: Can't see the video? Click here to see the post page. Sign Up below to get notified when the 3 part series goes live. You won't want to miss it!! p.s. Here are the activities seen in the video. The Great Collide Charge: Edited Sugar Sugar Pondering Percent Pentomino Puzzles Or You can also download the free Multi-Touch Book from iBooks to use on your iPad Beautiful Functions  

Gaining Insight

by Jon Orr

As the year closes down I think back on 2017.  I was curious about some of the stats on this site and was blown away at some of the numbers. I never thought that when I started sharing what goes on in my classroom that I would have over 150000 views in a single year! Amazing….and thats all because of you! I dug a bit deeper and found the three most popular posts from this year.

  1. Angry birds Parabolas
  2. Flippity Flip Bottle Flip
  3. Spiralling Grade 9 Math

At first glance I thought, “Yeah, those top 2 posts make sense. Their kinda gimmicky and fads. We search for those relevant topics our students are into; games and bottle flips! I’m sure if I wrote a post on fidget spinners it would be up there too.”But after thinking back on those activities and comparing them I think both their value come from being able to gain great insight into student thinking. And it’s that ability to assess our students deeper thinking here that teachers are drawn to.

Take the Angry Birds lesson for example, the creativity that is embedded  throughout the lesson is everything. Students get to choose how their flight paths look and act. There’s a story behind every arc they put into their activity. Their thinking can’t help but spill out all over, and I get to use that knowledge I gain to help push them along. Take away the angry birds and you still have a great creative lesson.

Replace it with a drawing, or trace of a picture or even a marble run and students experience the exact same creativity and learning goal expectations. The activity still allows me to have those insightful conversations.

The bottle flipping activity is a formative assessment gold mine. Again take away the bottles and replace with paper balls or card tossing and this lesson is identical, and I have just as much success at seeing into my students thinking.

It’s this insight that we all want. It’s this insight we need. Insight allows us to what Kyle Pearce and I have been calling ignite our moves. Seeing how a students thinks in live time allows us to act. We may act to address a misconception. We may act to push learning further. We may act to plan our next lesson. We may act to change our planned lesson into something that the students need at that moment. Lessons that allow insight into student thinking must be our norm.

This fits with the 3rd top resource. Spiralling Grade 9 Math. The file found on this post give us a day-by-day to teach with lessons just like the ones above. Not gimmicky lessons —  Lessons that spark curiosity! They are lessons that provide great insight so I can ignite my moves and fuel my students sense making. And fuelling sense making has to be our main purpose.

Have you used any of these resources? Comment below to share how?

Turbo Texting

by Jon Orr
The original idea for this lesson came from Al Overwijk. Thanks again Al!
The possible Ontario overall curriculum expectations covered in the activity:
  • Grade 10 applied:
    • graph a line and write the equation of a line from given information
  • Grade 9 applied & academic:
    • solve problems involving proportional reasoning;
    • apply data-management techniques to investigate relationships between two variables;
    • demonstrate an understanding of constant rate of change and its connection to linear relation
  • Grade 8:
    • solve problems by using proportional reasoning in a variety of meaningful contexts.
  • Grade 7:
    • demonstrate an understanding of proportional relationships using percent, ratio, and rate.
  • Grade 6:
    • demonstrate an understanding of relationships involving percent, ratio, and unit rate.

Act 1: Turbo Texting:

I started with “I was with my brother one afternoon and I needed to text my wife. After texting her, my brother informed me that I was a ‘terrible texter’. He said I was soooooo slow. I on the other hand disagreed. Then we decided to settle this once and for all—- race!!!”

If you’re viewing this through email you may have to click through to see the video

What do you notice? What do you wonder? Allow students a few minutes on their own to jot down their ideas. Then share with partners, then the class.
Here are a few questions/tasks I asked them next. I wanted to slowly build into deciding if this relationship was proportional.
  • What relationships can you see? — Number of characters in a text vs. the time to text it.
  • Create a scatter plot sketch of how the number of characters in a text affects the time to text that message.
  • How does this graph look with both texters on the same grid?
  • Who is the faster texter? Predict. How does your sketch show who is faster?
  • Kevin finishes first does that mean he is the faster texter?
  • How will we determine who is the faster texter? What will we need to see?
We took our time with these questions so we could develop and understand the relationship between characters in a text and the time to text it.

Act 2

If you’re viewing this through email you may have to click through to see the video

ME: “Use any method you choose to determine: Who is the faster texter?” I allowed them time here to work on a strategy. I watched carefully what strategies they used or didn’t use.

Seeing the different strategies gave us a nice discussion the importance understanding what rate we are determining and how to interpret it to answer the problem.

I showed this picture next:

and this piece of info…

Students completed this problem and we discussed the assumptions we needed to make.

Texting Time

How do your students compare to Jon and Kevin? Have them time each other while texting the 165 character message. Have them determine their texting speed to see who the fastest texter is in the class.

Linear Modelling

ME: “Now you may have texted that message in 18 seconds, but would you do this all of the time? Would you keep that same rate for a shorter message? Longer message? We better keep this experiment going.
I set them off to text various messages of different lengths using this handout (I modelled the handout format after Mary Bourassa’s Spegettini and Pennies handout – thanks Mary).

Click to download a copy

Students used Desmos and the regression tool to create a linear model. They used that model to predict how long it would take to text 140 characters, 200 characters, and this message: “Dear Mom and Dad I promise to never text and drive.” They finally timed themselves to compare the calculated time and the actual time.
Extension: Compare the relationship between the number of words in a message and the time to text the message. How would the equation change? Is it still proportional?