Online High?

Over at dy/dan, Dan put up a great post recapping some of his weekend reading. I got lost thinking in Cringely's post. Re: Cringely. My dissertation topic (I'm almost done, which is why I've been absent from the blogosphere...not like anyone noticed save my 5 followers :-) focuses on learning in the online environment through differing methods of communication (real-time chats vs. message boards) so his post was of particular interest to me. In higher education I can see this happening to some extent. When the internet can erase the geographical barriers that a student faces then it's a great solution. But, I don't see online education rising to such a popular point that a student would be willing to give up the "college experience." Moving away from home, tasting freedom, tailgating at a football game...all irreplaceable experiences. At the high school level, I suppose this could happen at some level, but his idea of an education floating around the internet would never replace the brick and mortar buildings that we call home. Why? We're babysitters. OK...OK...calm down. Don't get upset. We're much more than that. But, allowing high school students to learn from home would require a major shift in how society operates. However, our high schools could be replaced by "learning centers" with a one-to-one student to computer ratio. For every 35 or so students there is a proctor of sorts that would get the students logged on and direct them to the best source of...ERROR: UNDEFINED.

THIS is ultimately where this idea fails. This would require that most districts, and ultimately our government, be forward thinking and ahead of the curve. This just won't happen. I'm thinking of this possible solution within the confines of technology and education today as we know it. By the time this could become a reality, desktop computers will be old school. All of the teachers publishing content would either have to work for the government or textbook companies and those information traffickers would end up suffering from the same restrictions that we do today, just in some different form. Think about it. In my own classroom I can't access streaming video, some of the best pictures out there is blocked, and Youtube is a distant memory.

The greatest merit in these ideas is that they're on the bleeding edge of thinking in our field, and that is what some of the failing districts and schools around us need: ideas and the green light to implement them. I know too many teachers that don't bring forward good ideas because they know the answer before they bring forward the question. Stifled creativity is what is being penned right now as the C.O.D. in our schools' obituaries.

Mad Pumpkin Carving Skillz

OK...maybe not mad skills, but at least slightly angry. File this post under bad math humor.

Happy Halloween everyone!

I pity my 1st period

Quick thought: My poor first period gets the worst of me every day, and my last period of the day gets the best I have to offer. Not because I don't try, but because after I goof things up a time or two with 1st and 2nd period, I've cleaned everything up by the time 7th period rolls around.

Bright House Networks 2009 Educators Conference

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking at the Bright House Networks 2009 Educator's Conference. The conference was free and it was one of the best conferences around. Kudos to those who helped put it together.

Speaking at the conference reinforced a few beliefs for me:

1.) Teachers need a Google Reader/Blog subscription service of some sort. Professional Development is morphing into an online practice and every teacher needs to get in on the game. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but we all need to make a point of telling the teachers/administrators at our sites about the benefits of blogging. Need a good starting point for some great blogs that run the gamut through a range of disciplines? Start here. Most good conferences I go to have 300 teachers (all with great ideas) staring at one teacher doing all the talking. There needs to be a practice that allows the audience to share best practices. I'm thinking...I'm thinking. My early years in teaching made me feel a lot like the guy in the slide below. Teaching is a profession that, as a whole, needs to get better at sharing our great ideas with one another so that we don't feel like thieves surfing the net for someone else's great ideas.

2.) Our blog subscriptions need to be diverse. What are you reading right now? If you don't have Garr Reynolds or Nancy Duarte dialed in yet, then what are you waiting for?!

P.S. Sorry I've been away from the blog for so long. I've had some busy times with illness in the family and dissertation deadlines to deal with, so the blog took a back seat. But I'm back!

TMAI: Dallas Stadium

As a die-hard football fan I can't wait for the start of the NFL season so that I can bring in something mathematical from a game for the kids to chew on. I've had some success with videos that show a team's negative yardage play to illustrate adding negatives, but this year I wanted something different and wasn't sure I would find it. Then, Sunday night rolls around and this one drops in my lap:

I ripped the video from my DVR using Pinnacle's hardware for Mac. Then I exported an image sequence using Quicktime Pro at a rate of 8 frames per second. I took the images that illustrated the dimensions of the stadium:

I reminded them that the whole point of "Tell Me About It" is to get them to deliver the numbers in context so that it makes people say "Wow! Now I get it!" This is especially true when the numbers are so large that they are outside of the realm of our ability to experience them.

For example, I start my first TMAI segment of the year asking the students if they are 1 trillion seconds old (I got this from a book somewhere but can't remember which one). Half say yes, and the other half say no. After some investigation, and simple math operations, they calculate that 1 trillion seconds is equal to around 33,000 years. Now they understand how difficult it is to conceptualize numbers that big.

What about 1,225 feet?

I insist from Day 1 that a successful TMAI session is all about the four basic operations of math, creativity, and Google. While I operate Google the students fire away questions.

"How big is the Statue of Liberty?"

"Good one! 309 feet including the pedestal."

"How tall is Beyonce?"

"Well, she's 5'8" according to Google, but have you seen that many Beyonce's?" (Again, we're going for a tangible comparison that other people can relate to.)

Overall the students did well, but this isn't our first outing and won't be our last. Some students still aren't comfortable thinking like this but we're working on it.

Thank you, Kanye.

Well, Kanye's a tool, but he did give me some fodder for math class yesterday.

Each school year something goes viral and I'm right there, hittin' Youtube, gettin' my Ctrl+C on (or Command+C, for you Mac freaks like me), ready to let it loose the next day in class (we're keepin' it PG, of course). Something scandalous (like Kanye being stupid on the VMA's) happens, and I know the kids are going to be talking about it. Much to their surprise, I have the video set up, ready to roll.

Just when the kids thought they got out of a minute or so of math class, then we start talking about the internet age and viral video.

Two people see it and each person sends the link to two of their friends, and each of those four people Facebook it or Tweet it to their friends, etc. After some good discussion about how the viral video spreads, the students eventually come to terms with the fact that it is exponential and we've been talking math the whole time (ha!).

I put a similar graph into Geogebra and used a slider to control how steep the curve gets. Then we start talking about how quickly ideas spread today as opposed to fifty years ago. I ask the students to adjust the graph to show how this graph might look if this happened in 1959. Just to mess with their heads, I contend that the graph looks the same, and the only thing that I would have to change is the x-axis. Each tick on this x-axis in 1959 might represent months, whereas today it represents minutes.

Good discussion, all thanks to Kanye (let's see how long the above video lasts on Youtube before it gets yanked for some sort of copyright infringement).

Tell Me About It: Did You Know? Edition

My favorite Did You Know? version to date is hot off the digital press and ready to take into class tomorrow. I'm looking forward to running a Tell Me About It segment with this one: