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Wildcard Wednesday: Winning Students Over With Technology

Wildcard Wednesday: Winning Students Over With Technology

Today I led a highly structured class that made effective use of technology, and finally got some skeptical students on board. Several students told me when they got to class that they were having a hard time with rationalizing denominators, and fortunately I had my lesson set up to begin there. We started by rationalizing a one-term denominator and then a two-term denominator by hand. I explained how and why we began rationalizing denominators in the first place, and although…

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Wildcard Wednesday: Wolfram|Alpha

Wildcard Wednesday: Wolfram|Alpha

Last week I came across a Wired article: Wolfram|Alpha (& AI) Is Making It Easier To Cheat, and reading the article brought so many thoughts to mind about teaching mathematics in today’s world. Here goes … 1) We need to make sure that students understand that HW is a learning tool, not just something that earns points. — George Woodbury (@georgewoodbury) August 25, 2017 I feel that we often assume that students know why they do homework and that they…

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TBT – Reflection

TBT – Reflection

The cycle of learning that I use with my students is one of Discover – Engage – Reflect, and today I want to focus on Reflect. It is hard to imagine that true learning can happen without some sort of reflection. What have we done? How is it similar to what we have done before? How is it different? What are my key takeaways? What concepts are not as clear as they need to be? On Monday I revisited using…

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Learning from Mistakes

Learning from Mistakes

I tried something new in my intermediate algebra class. Over the last 3 classes we covered absolute value equations, absolute value inequalities, and graphing absolute value functions. I tried to tie these ideas together through the magic of Desmos, and although it started strong, it could have ended better. We began with the equation . Students solved this by hand and we went over the solution. Then I had students use Desmos to graph and determine where it intersected the…

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AMATYC 2015 – First Impressions

AMATYC 2015 – First Impressions

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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