Thursday, December 6, 2018

CMC North 2018: Reflections Part 1

I was fortunate enough this year to be able to attend (again!) my favorite math conference, which is CMC North at the Asilomar Conference Grounds. The view, the people, and the sessions are always great, and I always leave with a full head and a full heart.

This post is mostly a reflection and a record for me to look back at, but I hope it can be helpful to others as well. If you see something interesting in here and you'd like to know more, please reach out!

Session 1
I went to see Juan Gomez talk about tools he uses to promote student inquiry in his class. He talked about the importance of differentiation, and gave us ideas and examples for differentiating process, content, and product.

Differentiating the Process

We looked at Graspable Math as an example of how a teacher can differentiate the process by which students learn. One example we looked at consisted of graphing a polynomial function and using the scrubber tool to change an exponent. This allowed us to see the graph change, and we could compare to the original graph.

Differentiating the Content

We looked at a Desmos activity by Jon Orr called Pumpkin TimeBomb Prediction. In this activity students use scatterplots and relationships to predict the number of rubber bands wrapped around a pumpkin it will take to make the pumpkin explode. (Check out the results here.)

Next up we looked at CODAP, which is a free online data analysis software. Really interesting and powerful. Lots of ready to use data. One interaction that seemed really useful is that you could click on a point in the scatter plot of a large data set, and CODAP would auto-scroll to that data point in the table. Another feature that Juan showed us was that you can upload a csv file with your data, and then use the program to draw random samples from it.

Juan shared the Desmos Halloween Coloring Book project by Luke Walsh as an example of differentiating the product of learning. Luke had his students make halloween themed art using the function types they were learning about. Check out their work!

We ended by looking at Paul Jorgen's "My Wedding Dance Dilemna: Shout." In this activity, we use math modeling to make a dancer move to the different parts of the song Shout. This had us all giggling out loud. A powerful aspect of this activity is that you can revise your wedding dancer's movement and check your thinking. Students begin by sketching the height of the dancer over time before moving into more formal thinking of using equations to represent the height over time.


Juan helped us summarize our thinking at the end of the session and reiterated that his goal as a teacher is to be able to think flexibly in the moment and have tools that allow for that flexibility. 

As I was looking through my notes, I found this: 

"How can I do the pumpkin activity and still teach my content?

I believe this was a question asked by a participant in the session. Leaving this here as an open question to consider in the future. 





















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