Gone for a bit…

Now that I have started posting again 2-3 times a week, I feel obligated to let everyone know that I will be attending our schools 11th grade Wellness Retreat from tomorrow (Tuesday) morning until Friday afternoon so, while I have posts I am working on, there will be no new ones before this weekend.

Have a great 4 days! I look forward to sharing my thoughts on the experience, as well as how the first few days of school go next week.

Ciao.

Ted Kennedy Spoke at Liberty University!

Back in 1983 Ted Kennedy apparently got an invitation to speak at Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school). Ted may have been a lot of things, some good, some bad, but on this one I think he nailed it. Read the address here.

I picked this up in a blog post at the Americans United blog. A great read!

My First Prezi – Understanding By Design

About 5 years ago I, along with another colleague at my school, presented an overview of the book Understanding by Design (UbD) by Grant Wiggins & Jay McTighe. In addition we created a one sheet “UbD in a Nutshell” that summarized the three stages of the UbD design.

Apparently we did well enough that when our Headmaster wanted someone to give the staff a refresher during our before-school-starts staff week I was asked (the colleague who had helped me having left the school a few years ago) to give an updated performance.

Fast forward to today!

It was just about an hour long review of the main concepts and process. It was very ‘talky’ in that I did not plan a lot of interactivity. This was mainly because the rest of the morning was designed to be interactive with UbD around our own curriculum maps.

I used Prezi for the first time when making this presentation. Click here if you want to see it! The response during the presentation was low-key, making me really feel as if I needed to look for a parachute because the plane was falling fast. However, after it was over many people came up to offer their appreciation for what I had to say. Several going as far to say that the way I described the stages and different pieces of the UbD process really brought about a change in understanding for them. Needless to say, I was very, very excited.

One of those was one of our English teachers – a woman I have a lot of respect for – who later asked my thoughts on the Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings for her AP English course. To be honest, I was so honored by that I was almost speechless. I spent the next 15-20 minutes looking at and talking through what she had. She really had put some amazing thought into her preparation – it made me want to arrange to come to her class! (Unfortunately I teach during both periods that she teaches it. )

In addition, during the session immediately following my presentation I was also impressed with the level of conversation among the teachers, particularly during the whole group discussion. In the past I would say that our conversations about UbD often bogged down around the issues of picky technical issues and word-smithing. Today the conversation really got into making connections amoung courses and disciplines, overarching understandings, and finding a common ground.

Today was a good day!

Resolutions

Samjshah over at Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere has thrown down the gauntlet. He is challenging us to come up with “New Year’s Resolutions” for the new school year. His rules are:

• “You should come up with at least 1 but at most 3 resolutions. This is so you don’t get overwhelmed.
• They have to be easily doable and sustainable throughout the year. This is so you don’t get overwhelmed.
• You need to publicly announce them – whether it be on your blog, on twitter, on the comments here. This is so you have some external accountability.”

Ok, Sam. Here are mine:

1. Last year I had wanted to begin taping my class and reviewing what occurred, focusing on what I was doing as well as what the students were doing. It took a little while to set up the cameras and microphones (I have 4 cameras covering nearly the entire room and two directional microphones). Unfortunately, by the time everything was set up I found I didn’t have the time to start on that project. So my first resolution for this year is to record and watch 1 day’s worth of classes every two weeks. I only teach 3 classes, so this will be about 135 minutes of video every two weeks.
2. I am introducing my Geometry Honors classes to a problem-based curriculum which I have “borrowed” from Emma Willard School in Troy, NY. I know the Geometry teacher there, and she used to teach at Phillips Exeter Academy, which is where I modified my Calculus course from. She has created a Geometry specific version of their program that she has been using at Emma Willard for a few years. She let me have the curriculum and, while I will modify it slightly for our school, I will be using most of it this year. My resolution is to blog at least once every two weeks as to how it is going.

I think I will stop with two for this year. I want to do these well, so this should be enough. Unofficially I also plan on working on my presentation for NCTM in April, write out (and LaTeX) my solutions guide for the calculus textbook, and doing a good job as co-chair of my department this year.

Wish me luck!

Winplot for the Mac

I previously mentioned that I have Winplot on my computer – the absolutely amazing Windows graphing software written by Rick Parris, a math teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy. This software (and several others he wrote) is available free through the link I placed on Winplot. The one thing I have struggled with is that I would like all my students to have access to this amazing tool, but many of my students have Macs at home. Rick, for many good reasons, only writes his software for Windows machines and up until this point I assumed that the only way to get it to run on a Mac was a rather laborious or expensive process.

A couple weeks ago a teacher on the AP Calculus Electronic Discussion Group posted a link to a site that has a relatively quick method for setting up Winplot to use on a Mac using Mac OS X Leopard. Upon clicking through the link I was amazed to see that the site was for none other than a student at my school! He had done this for his fellow students in his Algebra 2 class and shared the link with them. Click here to go to the site.

On a side note, what this shows is the disconnectedness of technology use in our department. What should have been trumpeted throughout the department remained unnoticed until a teacher from outside the school directed me to it. As chair I need to work on this. Our teachers and students are doing good things with technology, but it can only help us all if we share.