Showing posts with label Videos. Show all posts

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What I've Been Up To

For those of you who were starting to wonder, I am alive! This summer has been crazy hectic and crazy good at the same time. The past few weeks have been consumed by Church Camp, Twitter Math Camp, OK Math Convening, and "Oh my goodness--it's August! And, I haven't done any lesson planning or classroom decorating" panic mode.

Now that my classroom decor is starting to come together, it's time to start focusing on what I want my students to do on the first two days of class. We start the school on Thursday, August 14th. Oh me. Oh my! So much to do before then!

In an attempt to get back into the swing of things with blogging before school starts, I want to share a side project that I have chosen to be a part of. As you all know, I adore blogging and twitter and the entire #MTBoS. So, it's only natural for me to want to get math teachers involved in this community which I love. Have you ever sat down and tried to list all of the math teacher bloggers from your state? Well, I did this for Oklahoma, and the list was surprisingly small. Want to see the list? I wrote it up as a blog post for OKMathTeachers!

If you didn't click on the preceding link, you missed out on something amazing. Okay, maybe it's not amazing. Amazingly crazy? Well, whatever it is, I did something I've never done before in my life. I video taped myself, AND I posted it to the Internet. I'll embed the video for you below. If you can't see it, click here to go to YouTube. It's me, and I'm talking about why I LOVE the #MTBoS.

So, I'm working on a team that is trying to get Oklahoma math teachers involved in the #MTBoS. Here's a post I wrote introducing OK teachers to the #MTBoS. For some teachers who have never even read a blog post before, getting involved in this online community of math teachers can sound incredibly intimidating. To help introduce teachers to the #MTBoS without (hopefully) scarring them for life, we are inviting Oklahoma math teachers to help write a collaborative blog. This blog will be housed on OKMathTeachers.com. Writing a few posts a year for a collaborative blog is less scary than starting your own blog, right??? I hope so!

I know that there has to be some Oklahoma math teachers who read my blog whom I have not had the pleasure to meet in person. If this is you, I want to extend the invitation to write some guest blog posts for OKMathTeachers.com! Scroll to the top of this page and hit the contact me button. Send me an e-mail telling me that you're an Oklahoma math teacher who would love to get started with blogging. I'll e-mail you back with all the details. We'd LOVE to have you! Or, if I have met you in person but I haven't invited you to be a part of this, e-mail me! The more the merrier!

If you're not an Oklahoma math teacher, I have a favor to ask of you as well. Please add OKMathTeachers.com to your RSS reader! Come Septemberish, we're aiming to have 5 new blog posts each week written by Oklahoma math teachers. It's going to be amazing. I can't wait to see what comes out of this collaborative effort! These posts will be written by Oklahoma teachers, but we want to share them with the entire world!

Detail: What I've Been Up To

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My Favorite YouTube Videos to Show in Math Class

I'm cleaning out my drafts folder in blogger. Most of my drafts are posts with titles to remind me about what I still need to write about. Is it bad that I don't remember what some of these titles even refer to anymore? Delete. Delete.

Today, I want to share with you the youtube videos I have used in my math classes over the past two years. It is my hope that I might introduce you to something you haven't seen before. I guess these could all be individual posts, but that's not gonna happen. As soon as school starts, I'm going to have a million and one new things to blog about. So, I want to blog about as much of my old stuff as possible before then.

The first few videos are ones that I show on Pi Day.

(By the way - I'm not sure if these embedded youtube videos will show up if you're reading this blog post via e-mail or RSS reader. If they don't show up, you may need to click through to my actual site to watch the videos.)

What Pi Sounds Like - Very cool musical version of pi! My band students especially love this video.

How Pi Was Nearly Changed to 3.2 - A fun little history lesson for students on how pi was almost changed forever.

The Pi Song - Cute song that will help students start memorizing the digits of pi.

Quadratic Formula Song to Adele's "Rolling In The Deep" - Funny story. I actually heard this version BEFORE I heard Adele's original song. Now, any time I hear the actual song, I think of it as an adaptation. Some of my students really enjoyed this.

y=mx+b Song - I like this short slope intercept song. My students voted it as their least favorite of my slope songs, though. :(

Colin Dodds - Number Types (Math Song) - I always use this video when introducing the Real Number System. I love the organization of his graphics!

Slope Music Video (Rise Up Run Out) - This is probably my students' favorite slope song. They begged me to play it while we were working on homework for the entire rest of the year. Some of them went out and listened to it on their own time. Love this song! I have even found myself singing it in the shower...

Colin Dodds - Slope (Math Song) - Another catchy slope song from Colin Dodds. I love his stuff!

Graph Shop - Graphing Lines Thrift Shop Parody - I think this was my favorite new math song this year. I went and listened to the actual lyrics of Thrift Shop after this. Not good! One day, my students asked me if I knew who Macklemore was. I thought he was a character on Harry Potter. Oops...

Slope Rida - "Slope" - I always use this video in my introduction to slope. LOVE it!

Nonagon - They Might Be Giants - I've never actually taught geometry, but I still manage to find a way to show this video to my students. Usually it goes like this - Do you want to hear my favorite math song? Sure! Show this video. For some reason, they are not as excited about it as me. It always makes for a sad day...

Slope Dude - This post wouldn't be complete without mentioning Slope Dude. I can't teach slope without him! This is the video that I hope my students remember until the day they die. A bit extreme? Maybe.

Colin Dodds - Pythagorean Theorem (Math Song) - My first year of teaching, my 8th grade Algebra 1 students were also required to take the 8th grade state math test in addition to the Algebra 1 test. One of the main 8th grade topics is the Pythagorean Theorem. I used this song as a quick review of that.

Meat-A-Morphosis: An Introduction to Functions - I use this video every time I introduce functions. The kids are outraged. And, it leads to all kinds of fun conversations. Most of these are centered around my decision to be a vegetarian... But, we also talk about math, too.

Hexaflexagons by Vi Hart - I love making hexaflexagons with my students. Vi Hart explains them way better than I ever could!

Hexaflexagon Safety Guide - After we make our own hexaflexagons, we watch this video to get some really cool decorating ideas.

Video for Combining Like Terms - This video is a little long, but it makes the perfect introduction for combining like terms. Watch it. You'll see why!

Flocabulary - Order of Operations Rap - My students love this order of operations rap. Apparently, it has a "sick beat." I guess that's a good thing??? All I know is that students were wanting to download this song on their MP3 players. In my book, that's a win!

PEMDAS - Don't Stress! - I also love this order of operations song. Catchy tune!

Graph! (WSHS Math Rap Song) - This was my first year to show this video during our linear equations unit. My students enjoyed it, but it's a bit long for my taste.

Minor Notes - Slope - My students asked to watch this video one day based on YouTube's recommendation. I agreed hesitantly. I try to not let students watch videos I haven't pre-screened. I made that mistake once. A student suggested a quadratic formula video and assured me that it was school appropriate. Then, one of the cartoon characters cut off the other character's head. Didn't see that one coming! I decided that anybody who would call themselves Mr. Q - U - E would have to be school appropriate. The song was okay. There's a lot of slope songs I like a lot better. But, my students loved it for some reason. I think their love might be more for the singer they deemed "handsome" than for the song...

Colin Dodds - Scientific Notation (Math Song) - Scientific notation was another one of the topics that my 8th graders were tested on that wasn't covered in Algebra 1. They really liked this video. It provided several opportunities to pause the song and think about the answer before continuing.

The "One Direction" Quadratic Formula Song - Here's another quadratic formula song that we listened to in Algebra 2. It's to a One Direction song that I'm not really familiar with, but my students were plenty familiar with it. I still prefer the Pop! Goes The Weasel version...

So - there you have it. My favorite youtube videos to use in math class. Do you have any favorites you don't see listed? Share them in the comments! I'm always on the lookout for new videos to share with my students. There are so many of them on Youtube, it can be hard to sort through them to find quality videos.

Detail: My Favorite YouTube Videos to Show in Math Class

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Don't accidentally transform your lab partner into a fish.

I love algebra. I really do. My first year of teaching, I taught three different levels of algebra. Last year, I taught 3 periods of Algebra 1, 2 periods of Algebra 2, and 1 period of Statistics. Next year, I will teach 3 periods of Algebra 1, 2 periods of Algebra 2, and 1 period of Trigonometry/Pre-Calculus. I don't teach Geometry, and I honestly don't miss it. I was a great geometry student in middle school, but I never did care too much for proofs. And, proofs didn't really grow on me while I was completing my bachelor's of science in pure mathematics, either. My collegiate experience with writing proofs helped me to gain an understanding of the true beauty of mathematics, but they never came naturally to me.

Every once in a while, I see a geometry lesson idea that makes me want to teach geometry. Examples include Algebrainiac's Dance Dance Transversal, School of Fisher's If You Give A Mouse A Cookie Project, the Nonagon Song, MissCalcul8's Surface Area Tin Man Project, and Proof Blocks (I realize I just said I don't care for proofs, but I think these would be fun!).

In a perfect world that didn't have high stakes testing and a bazillion standards to cover ever year, I'd love to teach a Geometry class that was 100% motivated by origami.

My sister recently forwarded me several e-mails that she received from her college. These would be the perfect thing if I was teaching conditional statements in geometry! Since I'm not teaching geometry, I'm going to share them with you guys in the hope that someone might find these useful and/or inspiring.

The videos were made by Northeastern State University to persuade students to participate in Priority Enrollment. The videos are short, clever, and they made me laugh.

Each video is about 40 seconds long, and I encourage you to watch them all. I'm not sure who made the videos, but they did a really good job. I really wonder about the background of the creator of these videos. Math major? Logician? If You Give A Mouse A Cookie lover?

I could see myself showing these videos to my students and having them write their own scripts using the if-then structure. To avoid using too much class time to make their own videos, you could use the Paper Slide Project that I learned about earlier this month from Janelle Graham. Students could prepare their paper slides as homework, and they could then film them in one take at the beginning of a class period.

Obviously, this would serve as a very basic introduction to if-then statements. After students have done more work with conditional statements, they could revisit their scripts and write converses, contrapositives, etc.

Enjoy the videos! And, share any ideas you have in the comments.

Don't get disowned.