Word to PDF (Batch Conversions)

Great automated script:

https://onabai.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/convert-word-files-docdocx-to-pdf-in-osx/

Combining PDF files quickly

Great article:

http://www.documentsnap.com/how-to-combine-pdf-files-in-mac-osx-using-automator-to-make-a-service/

Great model of time

http://www.sciencealert.com/watch-this-3-minute-animation-will-change-your-perception-of-time

Illuminations Tool

I like this tool, especially since it gives you the ability to create nets:

http://illuminations.nctm.org/Activity.aspx?id=3509

Excel and Google Sheets

I found this article and learned that I can use index and match in place of vlookup. Now my grade book can look up any data from any assessment and list out a score.

http://thinketg.com/say-goodbye-to-vlookup-and-hello-to-index-match/

In case the link breaks, here is the formula breakdown (screenshots from above site):

Chess games

Fantastic Video for scientific notation and exponential growth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km024eldY1A

How many students are suspended each year?

Let's make this a math lesson. https://t.co/gVjol6PiI6

— Brian Aspinall (@mraspinall) July 26, 2015

I thought this was a great idea! Here are my draft ideas.

Act 1:

Students walk in and see these questions:

"How many students do you think are suspended each year in the entire United States?"

Write down a reasonable range as an answer. Include your reasoning.

Before we deal with Super Bowl stadiums full of suspended students, I ask them to first think about the total number of suspenions. I want to students to contrast their instinct with the reality. Contrast and conflict tends to leave an impression on the mind. If their instinct is on track, they will have confirmation (which is pretty great as well).

Although students may write a response to the prompt without any assistance. Others will want to ask for more information (which is exactly what I want). If they are making progress, I will let them talk it out. If not, I will stop individual students, groups or even the entire class and ask what they need from to make a reasonable estimate. Some students will ask for the total number of students, which I am willing to give to help them:

Total students: about 49.8 million (I might write 4.98 e 7 to stress scientific notation). 

Once students have decided upon a reasonable range of values, I ask them to write those numbers out on a post-it. One high number and one low. We can post these on the wall to see the full range of guesses and talk about reasonable guesses (something based on their anecdotal experiences) and unreasonable guesses (0 and 49.8 million). 

Once we have talked out our ideas, I show this stat, with a slight omission:

Students can share their observations and questions.  If they have a wide range of questions, I like to type them out on the board as they ask them. There is something wonderful about being quoted in class. Eventually, we settle on the main question, "how many stadiums would they fill?"

To answer the questions, students need to ask for:

1. The seating capacity of the stadium

2. The total number of suspensions

Act 2:

As expected, I found a wide range of Superbowl seating capacities. So I give a few samples:

They also need to know the total number of suspensions:

3.45 out of school suspensions

3.5 in school suspensions

Act 3:

As students consider how to count the suspensions (one type or both), I like to point out the ambiguity of the statistic. Many powerful messages omit the necessary details needed to assess the validity of the message. In this case, we don't know what types of suspensions they were considering and what size stadium they were using.

With the stadiums selected, they might get something like this (this table also shows how many stadiums would hold all students):

When I show the final reveal slide, we will know a bit more about the assumptions the authors of this sign made (Mercedes stadium is by far the closest to 45, if we only consider out of school suspensions).

Although the reveal of "45" may only be somewhat climatic, I image that the discussion afterward could be very rich. We could discuss the following:

• Why did they only include out of school suspensions?
• Why didn't they use a smaller stadium to maximize their number?
• Does this number still seem large if we consider that all students would fill 651 stadiums?
• What percent of students are suspended?
• Is this stat helpful or misleading?

Aside from the powerful social commentary available in this lesson, I would also stress the use of mathematics in modeling the situation. It is always wonderful to give students a chance to critique a model and the assumptions that went into it. In the process, they do something I always want them to do: decide what is reasonable for themselves. 

Sources:

Total school enrollment: http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

School suspensions: http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/school-discipline/data.html

Would You Rather?

Lots of opportunities here:

https://wyrmath.wordpress.com

Remind App for Phones

Seems like a great idea:

https://www.remind.com/

Plickers Assessment

Lots of potential here:

https://www.plickers.com

Poster Generator

Great Resource for the classroom:

http://recitethis.com

Keep Students Moving

Here are some great suggestions:

http://mathforlove.com/2015/05/quick-physical-games-for-the-math-classroom/

3 Pointers in the NBA

So apparently, the amount of 3 point shots have gone up over time in the NBA:

http://espn.go.com/nba/playoffs/2015/story/_/id/12993098/nba-35-year-war-3-pointer

The question is, why?

Here is what I am thinking:

1. We could look at the data and correlate the increasing diversity in the NBA with increased 3 point shots. 

2. We could also analyze the correlation of a shortened 3 point line and the accuracy of the 3 point shot. 

Gay Marriage Stats

Great Article:

http://nyti.ms/1yvn9ti

5 Year Olds can learn calculus

Interesting Article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/

Double Negatives and Positives (some jokes)

A student sent me this:

"An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room said, "Yeah, right." —Sai Kishore K"

A nice image of the joke:

Some double negative jokes as well (why not):

Complement Subtraction

Love this algorithm, perfect for any level:

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/55949.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS5p9caXS4U&sns=em

Bootstrap

An interesting resource:

http://www.bootstrapworld.org

Linear and Quadratic Driving

Really intrigued by this find:

Why are stopping distances quadratic while recommended following distances linear? https://t.co/wnkH05M4Vw @Desmos

— Megan Schmidt (@Veganmathbeagle) June 16, 2015

Video games and Scientific Notation

A world without end, quadrillions of planets to explore, fractal math and of course, scientific notation:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/world-without-end-raffi-khatchadourian

Starting the Year

Youcubed is always a great resource. I really like their ideas for the first week:

https://www.youcubed.org/week-of-inspirational-math/

Megaannus and other Units

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year#SI_prefix_multipliers

funny comment thread: 

https://m.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2u0ryg/til_that_a_megaannus_is_a_unit_of_time_equal_to_1/


Article to spark conversation:
http://nyti.ms/1Ij7gPR

Modeling Risk Taking

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/firstyear/258

Creativity in Pedagogy

A good list of tips to rethink your lessons:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/creativity-in-classroom-trisha-riche

Math Puzzle: Shikaku

http://mathequalslove.blogspot.com/2015/04/logic-puzzle-love-shikaku-edition.html

Math Puzzle: Griddler

http://mathequalslove.blogspot.com/2015/04/logic-puzzle-love.html

Risk Taking Rubric

We like this one:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5FTxsu-S1CoUXZWQnozdFplT3c/view?usp=sharing

Risk Taking with What if

We are focusing on risk taking in the classroom. I am struggling with defining this in the math classroom, but I like the idea of using "what if" protocols, and I like this as an example (from xkcd):

https://what-if.xkcd.com/117/

Google Ad-ons

Form Ranger is exciting, it populates choices on forms from a spreadsheet:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/formranger/faepkjkcpnnghgdhiobglpppbfdnaehc?hl=en


Choice eliminator allows users to eliminate a choice they submitted in a form:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/choice-eliminator/mnhoinjhhhafgieggnhjekliaodnkigj?hl=en-US

California Drought Trends

This article in the New York Time offers a great chance to discuss graphs and trends with students:

http://nyti.ms/1FFYEBC

I would show the bare bones graph (minus numbers and data) first:

This would allow me to ask the low floor "what do you notice" question and then eventually lead to some specifics.

Doctopus, Goobric and Google Classroom...woa

Doctopus allows you to create personal files for all students will all types of parameters. Very awesome:



Goobric allows you to attach a rubric to a Doctopus Assignment. You can customize the rubric, add comments (including audio) and do great stuff like leave audio comments (and much much more):


These can also be integrated with Google Classroom:


Lots to think about and its all very exciting.

Great Google Drive Resource

http://cloudlab.newvisions.org/

Math can Illuminate a History of Racism

http://nyti.ms/1z35GIp

Entropy Anyone?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/this-is-what-happens-when-a-stadium-is-abandoned-for-years#.ywXlJG4p7

Linear Modeling with Flash Memory

Possible lesson in this (also a shocking look at early flash memory prices):

http://www.jcmit.com/flashprice.htm

http://www.themarysue.com/gigabyte-cost-over-years/



...more to come

Graph Stories

Every graph tells a story. I am thinking to show the graph of time vs. elevation without any context first. Something like this:

Then add in the context, piece by piece, until they see how the context sets the stage for meaning:

This might follow a discussion of the New York Times article from which I pulled this graphic:

http://nyti.ms/1GeuPXu

Filling up landfills with K-Cups

Illustration by John W. Tomac

This marketplace article gets me thinking about some powerful what-if questions:

What would happen if we continue consuming K-Cups at the same rate?

What would happen if we took all the K-Cups and put them side by side?

What if we stacked the K-Cups into a tower, how high would they go?

Here is a comprehensive article from the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/the-abominable-k-cup-coffee-pod-environment-problem/386501/

And then there is this:




A lot of the media buzz around K-Cups is based on this mother jones article, which claims that K-Cups could circle the Earth 10.5 times:

This calculation traces back to Murray Carpenter's book "Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us." 

Based on the height alone at 1.75 inches and production of 8.3e+9 K-Cups from Green Mountain along, we get 4,375,000,000 inches, about 9.2 times the circumference of the Earth. 

So this is perfect for a lesson centered on debate. Its time to find out which number is the most reasonable and why. 

Geogebra and Desmos Tutorials

Geogebra tutorials: http://mathandmultimedia.com/geogebra/


Desmos tutorials: http://reasonandwonder.com/learn-desmos/

Inifinite Chocolate? Yes Please

Great for discussion.

Possible analysis and lesson: http://mathandmultimedia.com/2014/07/14/infinite-chocolate/

Point-Point Slope Lesson

Great opener for a discussion on slope:

Full lesson: http://reasonandwonder.com/point-point-slope/#

Pasta Circle

Fun lesson involving estimation, circles and pasta!

Full lesson: http://reasonandwonder.com/pasta-circle/

Found at: http://reasonandwonder.com/

Football Player and Mathematician

Great article to share with students:

http://its-interesting.com/2015/03/19/baltimore-ravens-offensive-lineman-john-urschel-publishes-paper-in-math-journal/

Practice Standards

An entire site dedicated to illustrating the practice standards:

http://mathpractices.edc.org/

Quadratic Equations Rating Scale

Found this gem for Quadratic Equations. Nice teaching move Sam!

Sam's efficiency rating scale. 

Difference of Two Squares on Geogebra and Snap Cubes

Mathhombre with Geogebra:

http://mathhombre.tumblr.com/post/101931456149/difference-of-squares-inspired-by-mike-lawler



Matt Lawler with Snap Cubes:

https://mikesmathpage.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/studying-the-difference-of-squares-with-snap-cubes/

Making 6

I saw this great tweet and wanted to pass this fun problem on:

This is a puzzle a student once gave me. Some tough ones! pic.twitter.com/sjJyRAd2oa
— solve my maths (@solvemymaths) February 18, 2015

My answer in the link below:

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/atobc2oufn

23 million Dollar Books, Pricing Algorithms Compete on Amazon

Found this great story as a hook for exponential functions:

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

Basically a book called "the Making of a Fly" reached over 23 million dollars in cost when the pricing algorithms for two companies continuous competed with each other. Michael Eisen caught some of the prices over a few days and figured out the ratio between them:

Here is a current pricing of the book:

ZD Net also found some great screen shots to help tell the story. Its perfect for exponential growth:

Jeff Bezos and Negative Orders on Amazon

When Amazon first started, you could order a negative quantity of books.

See here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA&feature=youtu.be&t=43s

Perfect hook for negative numbers. Thanks Jeff!

Full video here:
 

Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Powerful visual of the great pacific Garbage patch:

http://visual.ly/great-pacific-garbage-patch

Harpers Index

Awesome pdf collection of data from Harpers:

http://harpers.org/departments/harpers-index/

Wow plotly

Beautiful graphs with data included:

https://plot.ly/feed/

Awesome