Thanks to Chris Craft for the Tweet alerting me to this.

Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher in Santa Cruz, has modestly shared a brilliant avenue for introducing graphing to high school students.

I went out and taped ten events. They were simple. I walked down two flights of stairs. I ran up a hill. I drove my car. Each event was exactly fifteen seconds long.

I put a handout on every student’s desk with a graph ready for each event.

I played each event and then paused the video. I asked questions like, “When the clock started, was I up high or down low?”

You get the idea. Not only does he share how he did the lesson, but he shares the videos themselves, along with handouts and instructions. Want to take it offline? He also shares an ISO that you can burn to a DVD. So if you teach graphing at all, you can grab this resource and be using it on Monday.

Way cool stuff and innovative in a simple, nonchalant wort of way. I seriously wonder how many other teachers are doing innovative work this way but have no idea just how valuable it would be to other educators if they took the time it share it?