Day: March 13, 2008

Yahoo! for teachers

Update: Bill Fitzgerald and Dan Meyer are now on a similar quest.

Yahoo has started a new web 2.0 site for helping teachers create, manage, and share “projects.” I’ve dreamed of a site where teachers collaborate (as well as beg, borrow, and steal) online in a massive community. Yeah, bloggers read and comment, but that’s not what I dream of. I want a huge archive and discussions on projects.

This could be that, if we’re speaking with all the idealism and naivety of a ten year old. But for a site like this to work, people have to use it. Without having played with it, my initial spidey sense is telling me that instead of the website being adaptable to us, instead we’re going to have to adapt to it. Constrained by what the website constitutes a “project,” teachers are likely to think this site isn’t as natural as it could be. Instead of technology adapting to our needs, we might reconfigure our needs to adapt to this technology. And I’d like to have some… not promise… but strong indicator that it’s worth it before heading off into the technological blue.

It’s unclear to me how useful this is going to be (if at all), but I’m going to keep an open mind. One thing I’ve often noted is how hard it is to find smartboard presentations online. I create mine from scratch, but I also imagine that others would find them useful, as I would find looking at (and stealing parts of) their presentation of the same material useful. I secretly have a hope that one day I will be the facilitator to this giant city wide project which will get teachers who actually make lessons (smartboard, handwritten, typed, group projects, etc.) to upload them to some site to share.

In any case, the website is still in beta form: http://beta.teachers.yahoo.com/

I signed up for an invite forever ago, and just got invited to join today, but maybe anyone can get one now that they’ve opened it up for testing.

We love radians

Introducing trigonometry has become even more of a challenge than I thought. I think about each part of the lesson really hard; I want to give it a flow and focus on teaching the concepts. What I don’t want trigonometry to be is a huge mess of ad hoc rules.

Today was my introduction to radians. Looking back, my presentation was a bit more complicated than it needed to be to get the idea across. And what wasn’t clear (although that was one of my objectives) was why we use radians instead of degrees. So I’m going to start off class tomorrow with a little silent slideshow, replete with my own histrionics to make extraordinarily clear why we! love! radians!

Without further ado: why radians? (PDF file) [Unfortunately, SlideShare is only showing 18 of 23 pages for some reason. The PDF is complete.]

I’ve also come to realize that more is going on with kids than this whole forest for the trees crap that I wrote about before.

There’s a second reason things are getting mucked up, and that doesn’t have anything to do with my concept behind each lesson, or the flow, or anything like that. I realized today that a lot of the things that kids get tripped up on are (surprise surprise) basic facts about numbers. Is “1/2 times pi” the same thing as “pi over 2”? Yes. Do they know that? Possibly.

Or, for example, there’s the issue of manipulating visual and fractional information in their heads. We’re learning about radians, and we learn that there are “2 pi” radians in a circle. Then I ask them to draw an angle of “3 pi over 2” radians. It was as if I asked them to dance around like a chicken while singing Ave Maria. And since the “pi” was there, they thought that using the calculator wasn’t really going to help them.

I think we’re slowly getting it, but I’m not sure. I’m going slowly, but I have now started identifying key skills and concepts that need to be honed before we move on with radians. For example, because of what I noticed in my lesson on radians, we’re going to be practicing working with fractions (the eternal scourge of math teachers) and pi. (See my thrown-together worksheet here.)

Imagine (for surely, gentle reader, this has never happened to you before) that you’re at a mini golf course and you’re putting at the infamous and dreaded windmill hole. By mandate from the PuttPutt gods, you are not allowed to leave until you get the ball into the windmill. There’s a mini golf coach there, trying to give you advice and show you how to hold the club and how to swing. However, after 20 tries you aren’t getting it. And then you try another 2o times. No luck. Now tell me how you think you’d feel at your mini golf coach who has been standing there trying to help you.

There will be whining, complaining, anger, and frustration — anxiety — all directed to this coach.

The analogy isn’t quite right, and I hope that my students don’t direct those feelings to me (this was an extended allegory, duh), but I can’t help but notice that the anxiety level has shot up in my room in the past two weeks, when I feel that one of my teaching talents is keeping a totally relaxed atmosphere.

UPDATE: My presentation (see above) on”Why Radians?” took 5 minutes and I think did the trick. I did it in both classes, and both seemed to get it. And the levity of it all made the classroom less tense. And with Spring Break descending upon us, we’re going to have a much needed break.