Month: February 2010

Real World Math!

Posted by Chris Atkinson on in Math 3 Comments

Mathalicious

I came across this site via Twitter yesterday and have been thoroughly impressed!  I teach 6th and 7th grade math to gifted students in the morning and today I used the proportion lesson comparing the iphone and ipad.  It was great!  My students were highly motivated and it fit perfectly with the work we have been doing with proportions and ratios.  If you teach math 6th grade and up YOU HAVE TO CHECK THIS SITE OUT! 

The handouts for students have already been made to accompany the lessons! 

Thanks Mathalicious, me and my students find you delicious! 

A Common Craft Inspired Project

Posted by Chris Atkinson on in classroom projects 1 Comment

My students spent some time a few months ago studying conflict in literature.  They learned about four major types of conflict:

– Character vs. Character, Character vs. Self, Character vs. Nature, Character vs. Society

As a culminating project the students created Common Craft inspired videos displaying some of the examples they noticed in their book club novel.

Enjoy and be inspired! Flip cameras rock!

Using Blog Badges To Motivate Students

Posted by Chris Atkinson on in classroom projects, creativity, design, inspiration, Web2.0 11 Comments

My 4/5 GT students all have their own blogs, which can be found on the sidebar of my classroom blog, and they are all extremely proud of their blogs and get visitors and comments from students all across the country.  Ok, so you get the picture: my students blog and THEY LIKE IT!

Well, we recently completed an interactive simulation on establishing a colony.  This simulation lasted three weeks,  almost everyday for 15-40 minutes, depending on the day.  My kids loved this simulation and were excited to find out which colony had the most wealth units and was to be declared “Mr Atkinson’s Most Successful Colony of 2010.”  Of course I painstakingly deliberated over what I could do to celebrate this, and since my school can’t use food as any type of award I had to think outside the box.  That’s when it came to me…

Badges and Certificates!

I decided to create a badge that the winners had the privilege of displaying on their blog, as well as give them a paper certificate to be able to hang at home.  This, to my surprise was a huge hit!

Here is a picture of the badge I created on Adobe Illustrator:

I like the idea of using badges to promote healthy competition and a sense of pride with certain competitive projects.  I downloaded the vector for the badge here:  Web 2.0 Badge Vectors

Once I created the badge to be what I wanted it to I stored it in the public folder of my Dropbox and used an image embed script to add it to a “text” widget in Edublogs on each of the winning students blog sidebar.

In conclusion I like the idea and plan on expanding on it more in the future!