32nd Anja S. Greer Conference

The 32nd Anja S. Greer Conference ended a week ago. Highlights were talks by Tom Dick of Oregon State, Kevin Bartkovich of Phillips Exeter Academy, and Siobhan Roberts. Participants enjoyed a week of good weather, challenging courses, good food, and fellowship. Of the 199 participants, 125 were here for the first time. In addition to 38 states being represented, participants came from China, Colombia, The Bahamas, Egypt, Turkey, Cambodia, and Canada. If interested in attending the conference, check out our webpage and make plans for the 33rd conference in June of 2017.

Very Interesting Article by John Hattie

John Allan Clinton Hattie was born in Timaru, New Zealand, and has been Professor of Education and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, since March 2011.

5 Big Ideas That Don't Work in Education

31st Anja S. Greer Conference

The 31st Anja S. Greer Conference ended last Friday and was once again a rousing success. Highlights were evening talks given by Helen Moore, Frank Griffin, and Colm Mulcahy. We're already working on the 32nd and have lined up Siobhan Roberts, Tom Dick, and Kevin Bartkovich for featured evening speakers. Registration begins January 15, 2016.

Rocketbook

Oh, I like this a lot. Interestingly, I've been using the Pilot friXion Erasable pens all year. They write smoothly and erase easily without smudging. I didn't realize they erased by the friction producing heat that turns the ink clear. Now, that's cool. But the upcoming Rocketbook is even cooler. Unlike Livescribe, you just need one notebook and will have lifetime access to the Rocketbook App. So after the initial expense, substantially less than Livescribe or similar recordable pen devices, you're all set. Check it out and be sure to watch the video. All available in July. I can't wait. As I wrote in an earlier blog, I have begun using a ScanSnap scanner to eliminate the need to save paper copies of documents, bills, statements, etc. Now, with Rocketbook, I will be able to take notes and solve problems using an inexpensive erasable pen, then upload them to DropBox, and reuse the notebook over and over. I am slowly reducing my personal carbon footprint. I love innovations like this.

Conferences and School Visits

While I wasn't able to attend MacWorld this year, I have gone to some terrific mathematics conferences and made some visits to some outstanding schools. Over the years, I've decided that the Northwest Mathematics Conference, hosted on a rotating basis by the Washington State Mathematics Council, the Oregon Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and the British Columbia Association of Math Teachers, and the California Math Council-Southern Annual Meeting are two of the best in the country. Both are fairly picky about who they let present (although they have both let me speak, so just how picky remains to be seen) and they are not so overly large that you get shut out of sessions. Probably the hottest speaker on the circuit right now is Dan Meyer  who spoke to packed rooms at both conferences. They put him in huge ballrooms so there is never a problem getting a seat. The annual NCTM meeting can be overwhelming so, if you're on the west coast in the fall, give these great conferences a try.

My school visits consisted of visiting Nido de Aguilas in Santiago, Chile once again, Redwood High School in Larkspur, CA, and, the Cate School in Carpinteria, CA, again. All were interesting and very worthwhile.

Nido has progressed with student-centered-learning to the point where they have actually purchased tables for some classrooms. Moreover, the mathematics department has begun to work with students around tables. They chose to have tables that could be separated into smaller units so students could work in groups of three or four, as well as one group at the large table.

Redwood High School is one of the finest public high schools in Northern California, and has been since it's beginning in 1958. It has been recognized three times as a California Distinguished High School (1990, 1996, and, 2003) and, in 2008, was recognized by the federal government as a National Blue Ribbons Program.

The Cate School is recognized as the best independent secondary boarding school on the west coast. The mathematics department, chaired by Frank Griffin, is innovative and makes excellent use of technology in the classroom. They are using iPads extensively, as well as laptops. While at Cate I was introduced to a great graphing calculator program for both Windows and Macintosh. I though it was powerful, capable of nice 3D plots, and affordable. And, they're working on a iPad version.

Article on Desmos Test Mode App

Here's a good article on the new Test Mode App that Desmos has made available.

Update on Tablet Initiative at Exeter

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we sort of adopted a 1:1 policy with iPads at Exeter last spring, beginning this past fall. I say "sort of adopted" because rather than designate iPad as the technology of choice, the principal indicated that students should bring a tablet device in September. If they didn't currently own a tablet, an iPad would be preferred since that's what the faculty had been working with for the past four years. This has now been modified for the fall of 2015 so that students simply need to bring a tablet, no preference at all given to iPad.

So, beginning last September, every student in my classes had a tablet. The ratio of iPads to other tablets was about 12:1. Due to the nature of the courses I taught in the fall, we seemed to gravitate to Desmos as our App of choice. While I prepared some demonstrations using Desmos, what the students produced on their own was far more impressive. Using an Apple TV and projector, students were eager to display what they had produced.

Here's an example: in Mathematics 431, the third term of an accelerated/honor calculus class, we consider circles of curvature for various curves. We begin with finding the center and radius of the circle of curvature for y = cos (x) at x = 0. Eventually, students are asked to find the center and radius of the circle of curvature for y = kx^2. Here is what one student produced (to see the list of commands, click the link):

There was no question that being able to visualize these problems helped students to understand the concepts better than simply doing them paper and pencil. Using sliders and being able to dynamically change the position of the point where the tangent, and therefore the normal, intersects the graph is a powerful way for students to understand the process.

In the winter term, I taught Mathematics 220 which is essentially a geometry course which meant the emphasis was on GeoGebra. I was fortunate to have a student with lots of experience in using GeoGebra and she became the tutor for others in the course. Once again, students were happy to share what they had done on their homework via the Apple TV. We used version 5 of GeoGebra and so had the ability to work in three dimensions. 

The experience of this academic year has made me no less a fan of using technology in my teaching. In fact, I'm more enthusiastic than ever. However, because we don't have a strong, school-wide policy regarding the use of tablets - teachers were told they didn't have to use them in their classes - there are some difficulties to overcome. This spring, on the first day of class in Mathematics 330, a course I taught in the fall and one in which we made great use of Desmos, I told the students that we would be using this App as well as GeoGebra, possibly. When I asked if they had experience using these Apps, all but one student raised a hand. I was mystified that a student could have actually gone through two terms of mathematics this year and not used Desmos. Sigh. But, fortunately because Desmos is so easy to master, it has not been a problem.

While I have been referring to Desmos and GeoGebra as Apps, in fact I use the web versions of both. This means I, and my students, can create a free account and save graphs and constructions. In Desmos, I have the ability to print, share, and embed graphs (that's how I created the link above). Recently, Desmos has produced a Test Mode version.

NPR on Robin Williams and Teaching

There have been many tributes to the actor/comedian Robin Williams in the past few days. Many reflect on the tragic loss of such a talented man, while many speak of the horrible toll that depression takes. This piece by NPR, What Robin Williams Taught Us About Teaching, is worth reading prior to the start of another school year. The second-to-last paragraph is particularly meaningful to those of us who believe in student-centered learning.

Article from down under about teaching

While we are gearing up for the start of another school year, teachers in Australia are halfway through their school year. Here's an interesting article, however, that's appropriate for the start of the year: Expert panel: What makes a good teacher? Enjoy and above all, have a great year.

More useful sites

Being a non-techie, I'm the perfect person to write about tech things. I learn about them well after the fact and love to share them with other "slow learners." I figure if I just heard about it, it is entirely possible I might not be the absolute last to find out...

These have to do with researching on the web. In Google, you can type site:edu (subject) and get a list of websites that end in edu and reference the subject. For example, if you type site:edu Barak Obama you get a list of all education sites referencing Barak Obama. You could also type site:com (subject) and get a list of all commercial websites referencing the subject. You can also type filetype:ppt (subject) and get a list of all PowerPoints (or other file types, like doc) referencing the subject.

Have you ever typed in a URL only to find the website no longer exists? Wayback Machine, an Internet archive site, will find old URLs and deliver the archived website. Here's how it works: when you go to the Wayback Machine website, you enter a URL that no longer works, like Tweeter.com (remember they used to sell speakers and other audio equipment?). Then, you get a timeline that shows when the website was active and when it went under. If you click on any of the years it was active, you get a calendar with certain dates highlighted by blue dots. Clicking on a highlighted date will get you to a screen shot of what the company's webpage looked like on that date.

Finally, something useful!

I usually stumble upon this kind of stuff well after everyone else...

Ever copied a link to paste into a document or email and the link was four lines long? Well, there are ways to shorten these links. Bitly has been around for a, er, bit and there is also a Google URL Shortner (thanks to Vi Richter for the heads up on this one) as well as Tinyurl (thanks to Frank Griffin for this one). All you do is copy the lengthy URL into one of these programs and a new, much shorter URL will be produced that you can then copy and paste into your document.

Tired of going to your email and finding loads of emails from LLBean, Macys, RedSox, and other sites your either consciously or unconsciously subscribed to? Periodically, I was unsubscribing to these emails, one-by-one. Well, another useful little program is called unroll.me. It scans your email, identifies subscription emails, lists them and allows you to either delete them or include them in a "roll up." Then, each day (unless you weren't sent any subscription emails...yeah, right) you get a "roll up" email that lists all the subscription emails which you can scan through, decide if you really want to look at any, then delete the whole lot with one click.

I've found these little programs to be very useful and, as far as I know, no Nigerian princes are involved.

How Twitter can be used as a Powerful Educational Tool

One of the keynote speakers at the recently held 30th Annual Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science, and Technology was Alan November, a leader in educational technology. Throughout the week there was a lot of tweeting going on! Here's a nice article, by Alan November, on Twitter in education. And, his website contains many other interesting and relevant articles.

The Noble Academy

I'm currently working (for three weeks) at The Noble Academy in Chicago, IL. Johnny Griffith and I have been working with the Noble Charter Schools Network for the past two summers, teaching classes - Johnny three English sections, me three mathematics sections - using the Harkness philosophy developed at Phillips Exeter Academy. The past two summers were spent at Pritzker College Prep, a very successful school in the Noble Network. This was the result of an partnership formed by Exeter's Director of Summer School, Ethan Shapiro, and Pritzker's principal, Pablo Sierra. Last year the Noble Network decided to add two new schools to their network, one, The Noble Academy,  being based on the Exeter model of teaching around a table (a Harkness table) in a student-centered classroom. So, this summer, Johnny and I are teaching one section each and observing Noble teachers as they teach summer school courses around "Harkness" tables. The Noble Academy will open it's doors this fall to a class of ninth-graders, then add a class each year until it becomes a full four-year high school. It's exciting to see Exeter's philosophy of teaching used outside the friendly confines (that's a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Chicago Cubs' Wrigley Field) of Phillips Exeter Academy.

If you're interested in reading about the Harkness method being used in schools elsewhere, here are two good sites...the blog Harkness for Thirty and The Southridge school website.

Phillips Academy, Andover, MA

I had a great two-day visit to Andover this past week. The mathematics department took two days out of classes to hold a technology workshop in which they looked at various programs and Apps. Topics ranged from Latex, GeoGebra, Desmos, Notability, and Canvas, the open-source learning management system used by Andover.

I also learned about Andover's collaboration with Khan Academy to create calculus problem sets for student practice. Andover is also developing an on-line calculus course which include some fantastic videos produced by Chris Odden. Both of these projects are quite impressive and well worth a look - see the links below. Andover is making great strides in moving to a technology-based curriculum. To paraphrase department chair Bill Scott, "Kids today live in the high-tech/video world; we should be part of this world."

To see what Andover has produced for Khan Academy, go to the website, click on LEARN in menu bar, click on Math, then slide over to a topic - Differential calculus, for example. Then click on a topic - Taking derivatives, maybe. Now you will see a list of topics and, within each, a list of videos that show examples. These are marked by u. 

Items marked by a ✮ consist of exercises developed by Andover teachers.

To see the amazing videos created by Chris Odden, click here.