Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Educon Math 2.0 Takeaways-Part 1

Chris Lehmann talks about the future of SLA at Educon.
Math 2.0 is alive and well at SLA where students, teachers and their linchpin leader are carving out a more powerful way to teach and learn math. Though they are only at the beginning of their journey in creating a project based learning curriculum for math, but the trip looks promising for significant student centered learning of math. Here are some of my takeaways.

"And friends, they may call it a movement." - Jon Becker
For me this movement will empower students and teachers to carve pathways so they can follow their passion for teaching and learning.

Teachers and students should be partners in the learning enterprise. That's a critical paradigm shift.

We need teachers & students who will take interesting ideas, questions, neat phenomenon to ask this Dan Meyer inspired question: What can You do with this (WCYDWT)? For example, today's massive storm over most of the country produced mostly ice, sleet and even rain in the northeast while the temperature was below 32º. How is that possible? (Watch Eliot Abrams explain it.) The details of his graphs are difficult to interpret. Have your class recreate the graphs with your guidance so that everyone including the teacher understand it better. Then share it to the world on the Web! (Sounds like an assignment for me.)

Teachers should encourage students to create math videos where students share their findings and takeaways from answering interesting questions that have surprise answers. How about this one I shared with my students as part of a unit on probability? Newspaper headline: British Hunter is Shot By a Fox in Its Burrow. Really? See details. WCYDWT. How likely is this event? For starters.


  1. I love this post, Ihor. Here's a math video to add to your collection. It's not exactly about anwering a surprising question, but is a surprisingly engaging way for the students to process their understanding of a process without having to do a hundred questions. What I call 'languaging the math'goes a long way, and this teacher was smart enough (I'm guessing) to give the students some clear guidelines about what he/she wanted by way of a video response. Link to The Singing y=mx+b Project -->

  2. Thanks. The video is very engaging and the kids had a lot of fun doing it. My only concern is that it doesn't share much about what y=mx+b is about. I would have encouraged the students to share more about the math involved and still be in keeping with the spirit of the song. A good example of what I mean doesn't come to mind right now, but I'll share one when I find one that I've seen on Youtube.