Matt's Media Tip 11-13-2012

themselves in creative ways. After all, what could be better than having your students perform interpretive dance to a song about the order of operations? Don’t believe me? Check these elementary students and their dance! Want to replicate this in your classroom? Check out this link to learn how.

It Takes a Village Did you know that Discovery Education has built-in math tutors? Yep, there are over 11,000 Math Overviews and Explanations embedded into Discovery Education. Each Math Overview and Explanation includes a math educator walking through a specific math problem step-by-step with annotations. Since the media is digital it can be rewound, sped up, and/or paused at any point. And since it is within Discovery Education it can be assigned as homework to an individual student or whole class. That means that your students can now have 11,000+ math teachers on-demand. Great for remediation, great for extension, great for differentiation, this media is pretty special stuff.

Even more Math Tutors WebMath might be one of my favorite resources within Discovery Education. And guess what? It is free. It doesn’t require a log-in. This means that anyone can access this terrific tool. Parents, grandparents, teachers, students, community members - anyone who can type in www.discoveryducation.com into their browser can find WebMath. When you land on the page, simply scroll over to the Parents tab and select WebMath. This will bring up a great tool for learning and reviewing math. You’ll find elementary items like counting coins to complicated things like Trig. and Calc. and everything in between. This tool is designed to help you find the solution by breaking down and explaining each part of any problem.

Interacting With The Media Recently I came across an amazing math educator, Dan Myer, and his fantastic resources. If you haven’t had a chance to read Dan Meyer’s blog you’ll need to put it on your must read list - regardless of what subject you teach. Dan concentrates on engaging his students by combining “Concrete Concepts (what it is) with Concrete Tasks (what you do with it).” What I like most about Dan Myer is that he breaks down complicated math problems into chunks using interactive media, he demonstrates real world How am I doing? applications...and he ties it all to the Common Core. He shares all of his lessons, his Math in Three I would love to know your thoughts.

Acts, with the world and invites others to collaborate with him and share their ideas. To see this Use this link to tell me! amazing list of resources check out Dan Myer’s Three-Act Math Tasks. My favorite - The Taco Truck.