Desmos

Being a Math teacher turned instructional technology teacher I could not have been happier to see such a wonderful web tool as Desmos, an online graphing calculator.  It will do almost everything a $100 plus graphing calculator will do and sometime more.  It is based on html 5 code so it works on all mobile devices and does not use a lot of broad band.  On YouTube, Desmos has their own channel where you can learn more about the graphing calculator and all that can be accomplished using this wonderful tool.  They even have google account tie in so if your school has Google Apps for education, you can have your students use their district provide accounts to save graphs as part of their assignment without having to create an account on their own potentially.

Then one of my favorite bloggers tweeted this on March 5, 2013 about an offshoot using Desmos which led me to Daily Desmos.  This site challenges you to match different graphs using Desmos and then send them your solutions.  This would be a perfect way to challenge your high level students.

Daily Desmos. Another creative single-serving website from the ever-creative math edublogotwitterwhateversphere. bit.ly/10av4Q7
— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) March 5, 2013

Learning Upgraded

This is a YouTube channel that is called Learning Upgraded that features math and english concepts that are used in their online learning program.  There are limited amount of videos for both math and english as they would like you or your school to sign up for their online tutorial business, but if they are offering free videos you can always use them in your classroom as well as a way of introducing a given topic.  The videos can seem a little "over the top" but you students will probably remember them because of that.

or

Douweosinga blog has this great tool that allows you embed how many states you have visited or how many countries world wide you have visited as well. I can see using this as geography project or as a math project where you use the numbers from all the students in a statistical analysis.




visited 19 states (38%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

Wanna be an Air Traffic Controler?

When I was down at ASTE at the end of February, I attended a session hosted by the FAA on "First to the Future." It was mainly about a website called Smart Skies which leads to Line Up With Math where a teacher can have students practice being an air traffic controler while practicing math skills. They have worksheets, teacher guides, and an online simulator that is web based to put in to practice middle school math skills using the equaiton d=rt. It was a lot of fun trying to get the planes to land at their final destination without being to close to each other. There are also a couple of videos in Section A that are interesting to watch as well.

The Smart Skies also can take you to Fly By Math which is where you should start with your students as it goes over the basics of what you need to learn in able to be successful when doing the problems in Line Up With math.

Overall I would give this site a 5 out of 5 Stars for the amount of resources, overall appearence and usefulness of the website. This one is worth trying in your math classroom.