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.