Skoool Maths

Throughout this term you have been working once every two weeks using the Numberline tool or the Mathematical tool kit (graphing tool) and perhaps other online maths tools. Also you posted your results onto this blog and were able to read what other students in other schools thought. What did you think of working in this way? Was it helpful? Did you enjoy it?

Please give well thought out constructive* answers to the following questions:

1. Did the Numberline tool or the Mathematical tool kit (graphing tool) help you to understand what you were learning? Why?
2. Did posting to the blog help you remember what you learned better? Why?
3. Did you like posting to the blog? Why?
4. Did you like being able to read other people’s posts? Why?
5. Would it have been more useful if you could have interacted with other students more that you could through the blog? Why?
6. Would you like to work like this more in the future? Why?
7. Would working like this be useful in other subjects? Why? If so, which subjects?

*brief answers that only say “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it” or “It was boring ” are not very helpful for improving what teachers can do to make your learning more interesting and helpful.

For this last activity your teacher has a number of options to choose for you to do. You should have spoken with your teacher before you made your choice. The choices are:-

1. One of the investigations from Cycles 1 to 4 that you did not attempt during these earlier cycles, or repeat a previous activity that you would like to develop further, or perhaps you would like to develop an entirely new activity.
2. Use one of the activities that your teacher was provided within a Smartboard Interactive Whiteboard file, or you teacher may have developed an activity using another type of Interactive Whiteboard (Promeathean, Teamboard, Mimeo or others).
3. Doing an investigation using digital learning objects that your teacher has access to from Digilearn.  (Ask them to show you the Jube making machine ID no (L3667)

In your blog post be sure to describe 1) what you did in your activity, 2) what it was that you were investigating and 3) what it was that you found out.

Make sure you use the rubric your teacher gave you to self assess your blog post. Give yourself a rating or High, Medium, Low or Very low and include that in your post. Discuss with your teacher why you gave yourself the rating you decided upon.

This is the first opportunity you have had to develop your own investigation activity. You may choose to do one of the investigations that you did not attempt during the earlier cycles or repeat a previous activity that you would like to develop further or develop an entirely new activity. You should have spoken with your teacher before you made your choice. In you blog post be sure to describe 1) what you did in your activity, 2) what it was that you were investigating and 3) what it was that you found out. Give feedback to one other student who also developed their own activity.

In this activity you used the Coordinates and Graphing feature of the Mathematics Toolkit to investigate the connections between families of curves equations. By examining your graphs, and comparing these to their corresponding equations, explain how you can know from an equation what the basic shape of its graph would be like. As much as possible, you should use terms like “gradient”, intercepts, translation, dilation and reflection in your descriptions.

Give feedback to two other students on their blog posts for this Activity.

In this investigation you used the 2D Shape Creation feature of the Mathematics Toolkit to investigate the properties of different shapes and provide mathematical descriptions of 3, 4 and 5 sided shapes. Starting with triangles, describe what happens to the angles and side lengths as you change the shape of the triangle. What do you notice? What other shapes did you investigate? Describe the characteristics of these shapes. After you discussed what you noticed with your teacher, what other investigations did you do? Ask you teacher to choose someone for you to give feedback on their blog post.

In this activity you used the 2D Shape Creation feature of the Mathematics Toolkit to develop an understanding of different type of TRANSFORMATIONS and their effect upon graphs and objects. Post the mathematical descriptions you developed of the following transformations: Translation, Reflection and Rotation.  Describe what happens as you investigated each type of transformation.

In this activity you used the Coordinates and Graphing feature of the Mathematics Toolkit to develop an understanding of coordinates. You would have produced several “dot to dot” coordinate maps and then tested the accuracy of your coordinate maps by asking another student team to use the maps to produce the original shapes.

Tell us about the coordinate maps, simple and complex shapes, that your team created. When you gave your coordinate maps to another team, could they work out what the shapes. According to the feedback the other teams gave you, how accurate were your coordinate maps?

In this activity you worked with other students to investigate decimals and their corresponding fractions. In your post explain to other students how decimals are related to fractions and what “equivalent” fractions means. For example why is 0.3 equivalent to 3/10, but 0.4 is equivalent to 2/5? Is 0.4 equivalent to an other fractions. What is the difference between “equals” and “equivalent”? Discuss other fractions and their equivalent decimals. Ask someone to give you some feedback on your blog post (have them post their feedback).

A number of you have made comments that your posts have been “lost”. How frustrating would that be if you put in a lot of effort and lost the post? Fortunately though no one has lost their post.

NOTE THIS: The FIRST time you post to the blog what you write does not appear until it has been approved by an administrator. This is to stop people spamming or putting up advertising and things like this.

Once your first post has been approved  your posts will all appear immediately. If you use a different email address each time you post the blog will see your post as a first time post and it will hold it back for an administrator to approve, so always use the same email address when you post.

Now you have used the Charting Feature of the Mathematics Toolkit to generate a frequency distribution chart and a bar chart. What does this bar chart tell you? Use your chart to provide a mathematical explanation of why some numbers come up more often than others.

Present your explanation to 2 other students who are to provide you with formal feedback on your blog post. They should comment on the effectiveness of your explanation.