Friday, February 29, 2008

Pocket-able Math Supports

I love aimless surfing! It always seems to result in finding something that I never expected to come across...

In this episode of aimless surfing, I came across the website "Fantastic Flexible Foldables" by Carol DeFreese. This site contains seven different foldable activities for math. The one that I had a chance to explore in depth was the Fraction Mini Book which provides a number of hints and rules for working with fractions and mixed numbers. The ingenious part of this is that it literally allows a students to have all of these rules at their fingertips. Just print out the PDF or Word file, follow the directions cutting and folding it and then VOILA!, an instant resource on fractions.

The site also contains Factors and Multiples Mini Book, Fortune Teller Game, Geometry Tetfraflexagon, Integer Infinity Square, Fraction Flipper/Decimal Flipper/Music Flipper, and Lines Trihexaflexagon. While some of these are resources like the Fractions Mini Book, others are designed to be used to help teach various mathematical concepts.

The Fraction Mini Book reminds me of a concept I heard a long time ago as I was listening to a presentation from Dave Edyburn called Cognitive Credit Cards. A Cognitive Credit Card is an intervention that involved having a credit card sized laminated card that contains different cues for a specific topic. The intervention was received by students, teachers, and parents.

I bet one can do something similiar using PocketMod as well.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

21st Century Tools


Find more videos like this on Illinois Technology Conference For Educators


I just came across this video and thought I'd share...

I have to say the video makes an important point. There has been much discussion on issues of differentiated instruction, 21st Century Skills, and Response to Intervention...all of which are important. However, each of these requires our schools to have the necessary infrastructure to realize these initiatives...