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Tag: George Woodbury

Discovery & Reflection in Developmental Math

Discovery & Reflection in Developmental Math

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I’m in the middle of a one-semester leave, and in addition to working my way through Euclid’s Elements I have really cranked up my reading in anticipation of my return in Fall. I am currently reading Jo Boaler’s Mathematical Mindsets. I was happy to see that she supports my beliefs that student learning increases when students participate in the discovery of concepts as well as when students reflect on their learning. These have been two areas of emphasis for me…

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Problems To Use In Class

Problems To Use In Class

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One thing I like to do in class is end with a short assignment to see how well students understand the material from that section. There are a couple of short quizzes that are available in the 4th edition of my combined elementary & intermediate algebra textbook. First, in the Video Notebook (located for students inside MyMathLab) each section of the notebook ends with a 5-question self-assessment quiz that works really well for this purpose. I selected 5 problems that…

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Using My Videos In Class

Using My Videos In Class

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I wanted to share one of my in-class strategies for using the videos in my 4th edition combined algebra text. For the latest edition I created over 3000 short videos – conceptual, technology (TI-84), study skills, … In this article I am focusing on the videos I made that correspond to the examples in the textbook as well as the two associated Quick Check exercises. (Each example in the textbook has two corresponding Quick Check exercises.) Round One – Example…

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uCLID – New Blog Project

uCLID – New Blog Project

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At the beginning of the new year I started a blog project called uCLID. Each weekday, and most weekends as well, I intend to work my way through one of the propositions is Euclid’s Elements. It’s been a lot of fun. You can keep up on my progress through the “Blog” tab on my website, or by going directly to this address: http://www.georgewoodbury.com/euclid/ I just posted Proposition 24 in Book 1 today, so that puts me halfway through Book 1….

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AMATYC 2015 – First Impressions

AMATYC 2015 – First Impressions

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You can always see which way the pendulum is swinging at AMATYC. Lots of sessions on tablet/smart phone apps, getting online students more engaged, and various pathways approaches. So different from my first AMATYC. I have seen, firsthand, how mobile technology can impact the classroom. A couple of weeks ago I was introducing my students to the graph of a parabola. I wanted to graph a parabola using Desmos, have my students observe the results, and tell me which points…

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Factoring Trinomials (x^2+bx+c): Sometimes You Should Start With b, Not c

Factoring Trinomials (x^2+bx+c): Sometimes You Should Start With b, Not c

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In today’s class we ran into the trinomial This can be challenging for students just learning to factor because they are not familiar with the factor set of 208. Traditionally I recommend that students follow the 10-second rule: If you cannot find the correct factor pairing within 10 seconds, you should move on to listing all factor pairs of c. This would result in the following pairs: That means that students need to try 13 potential factors (1 through 13)…

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Factoring – A New Approach

Factoring – A New Approach

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This semester I have been trying to help my students discover mathematics, rather than having everything coming straight from me. My goal is to get them to think more while also gaining confidence in their own abilities. One topic that has always given my students trouble is factoring trinomials that have a leading coefficient other than 1. Here’s what I tried. We had spent the day before factoring trinomials that did have a leading coefficient of 1, and my students…

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Simulations – #ICTCM15

Simulations – #ICTCM15

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I will be speaking about incorporating simulations early in an intro stats course to help students develop an intuitive understanding of inference well before we actually cover inference formally. I will be discussing two StatCrunch applets that I use. One is the Coin Flipping applet which allows students to simulate gathering samples of qualitative data. The second is a resampling applet that helps students to compare two means. I have added two assignments that I use in conjunction with these…

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Quiz Inspections

Quiz Inspections

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As my students are getting ready for their final exam, I assign a MyMathLab quiz that is connected to a personalized homework assignment. There are 36 questions on the quiz, with 136 related questions on the homework assignment. For each question a student gets right on the quiz, all related problems (typically 4) are removed from the homework assignment. This allows students to focus on the problems they struggled with, which is one of the most important factors in preparing…

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