Friday, September 24, 2010

Workshop-Styled Presentation Tips?

My department head has commissioned me to put together a presentation on available math teaching resources on the web. He said his goal is for "people to really fall in love with the idea of these web resources" by the end of the (relatively short, less than an hour) presentation.

Suggestions?? I am thinking of launching it with a fun activity -- one of Dan Meyer's graphing stories (ie. make the teachers actually try graphing it), and then giving them a few great worksheets I found from Dan Greene's blog (they won't do these... they'll just look at it, compared with the solution), then giving them the gist of WCYDWT, followed by Dan Meyer's escalator/current movement video as an example.

Then, I think for the hands-on portion, I am going to direct the teachers to Sam Shah's virtual filing cabinet and divy them up by discipline, and they would poke through the list of links to find a few interesting examples of a different way to present something that they already teach in their classes.

In the end, we will have a shareout, and maybe play with a GeoGebra applet (if time allows) and I'll give the teachers a short list of (what I consider) the most useful websites.

What do you think about this plan?? Suggestions are very welcome! (I've still got weeks until the presentation, but my department head has already spoken to me about it SEVERAL times. I think he really wants to get the most out of this.)

4 comments:

  1. Cool idea! I've gotten some teachers on board with using some of our "Conversations About Teaching" time (read: Tuesday meetings with little/no structure and no true direction) to start making our own Virtual Filing Cabinet - with print resources (that we scan in) and online resources (that we use). All organized by topic.

    I honestly think with very little direction and time, and I'm not sure how much buy in we have, that this will turn into anything. But hey, at least I'll finally have time to look through my 70+ del.ic.ious bookmarks on calculus, to find which ones are useful for particular topics I teach. That way when I get there, I know where to look...

    Sam

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  2. Would any of the Mathalicious stuff be useful?

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  3. @Karim I have certainly used Mathalicious material myself, and would definitely include it in my list of links to check out. :) But, some of my favorite materials at mathalicious target math levels that are lower than what the other teachers teach, so I'm thinking that for a workshop, it wouldn't be where I would start. Might not be a bad idea to end with something from there though. (My favorite is the TV-buying lesson. It's got good visuals and introduces good discussion topics.)

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  4. Right. I forgot you're high school, and most of the Mathalicious stuff is for middle school (save for some of the Alg II and Pythagorean Theorem stuff). Actually, Mimi, I just read your music lesson idea, and think it's one of the coolest ideas I've ever seen...no hyperbole intended. Indeed, there's all sorts of great stuff on this site in general. Anyway, hopefully you'll include the music lesson in your workshop.

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