BACK TO THE OLD WITH A SPLASH OF NEW

This week I had both a good lesson and bad lesson, both dealing with the same topic.  This is progress for me, because as soon as I began diving into the lesson the first time, I knew it was a great idea, just poorly planned in terms of time management.  The topic was line of best fit.  In case you don't know, you must look at a trend of any data given, and predict what it is going to happen in the future.  Sounds simple, especially if a graph is in front of you.  But in order to predict with a precision, you should create a formula.  Hence, the algebra.

Well, that's what we did.  But we did it using my salary and my spending based on what my paycheck and bank account said.  The students were definitely in to seeing my spending trends and the lesson was going to be AWESOME!!  Until, I tried to break it down over 31 days for the month and we had to do all of the calculations of where my account stood each day........................boring!!  It was way too slow for me, and I even praised the kids for pushing through it with me.  In the end, we did the lesson, but I had to seriously tweak it before I taught the next class this lesson.  So I dove back to the old Apple stock!!  This is the same lesson except I use points from some company that the kids like.  We graphed points using this data.  Very cool and leads to a lot of good topic discussions.  This basically got the same point across that my other lesson did, in better than half of the time. We find out the function of the data in a linear form and then I have them predict how much the stock would be worth in "X" amount of days using their formula.
I finalized the assignment by having them go and find data on their own.  NFL statistics, crime statistics, stocks............etc., something that they were interested in.  They then were able to mimic the lesson taught.  I had them do everything by hand.  Once I checked their work, they graphed the same thing using a computer program, posted it to their blog along with the function that they were able to find, and then I asked each individual a unique question that they had to answer based on their data and graph.  Here is one of my students postings.

Good points to the lesson:

• Discussion
• Engagement
• Deep understanding of the topic at hand

Bad points to the lesson:

• I'm at the board throwing out probing questions
• I'm writing everything I want them to write down.

I think in the future I'm going to add some sort of tweak to it so that they produce a quick summary and answer a question or give them some sort of goal.  My database lesson is going to be working off the line of best fit.  It is one of my favorite lessons to teach because it summarizes why we use graphs and how we can predict with some sort of accuracy.

Tsunami

So this week I took the students through the events of Sri Lanka in 2004. We watched a few clips of the horror and they asked tons of questions. My students were all around the age 0f 9 or 10 at this time, but they remembered it. We discussed the devastation and what a tsunami was and how they are created.

I then used Google Earth to show them where the earthquake had taken place. Using a "ruler" tool, I was able to connect a line from the coastline of Sri Lanka to the epicenter and measure the distance. I made up another spot of where the wave was after "X" amount of seconds and some times of when this was taking place. I explained to the kids that they are the Homeland Security of the nation of Sri Lanka, and they have to figure out how long the had before the wave hits the coastline. They must evacuate the coastline by a certain time after figuring out the speed of the wave.

After giving them some time, I went ahead and showed them how I would've solved it. A lot of them were very close in solving the problem. They used the tools given to them by previous teachers to solve the problem. I then proceeded to give them some new tools in which we use in algebra formulas. Slope and the Point-Slope Formula in function form was my goal for them that day.

Granted, this kept the students attention and they were all 100% engaged in figuring it out. The entire time that I was giving the lesson, I was thinking, how can I have them do all of this? I think upon reflection, I would give them some coordinates to find on the earth and find the distances on their own. I would show them the tools to use on google earth and they would have to recreate that much. I would provide an XY table for those that I saw subtracting the distance for each second that went by. I also think that I would send them a video of how to create functions from real life problems to see if my brightest students were able to come up with something.

The finale of the day was to have them create their own real life problem given some numbers. I wanted to see if they were able to be creative even though the numbers were just given to them. I did this because we were getting pressed for time. I know in the future that I want them to look up a natural disaster and come up with their own scenario using real data.