"Blogging for HOTS": Post #1

Upon reviewing multiple blog pages for teachers of mathematics I was really impressed at the overload of information available. The first blog I navigated through was Ms.Cookies'. Ms. Cookie is a high school math teacher who seems to have her stuff together. Her blog, like the others I looked at, was not specifically designed for a class, but it does offer great information. What I liked specifically from her blog was she had an idea for a foldable where she asked questions about circles in the form of TF or Always, Sometimes, Never. An idea that I got from this was to have the kids go to their blog and do this for a quiz or if not a quiz create some form of online notes so that they could refer back to the information. The next blog I looked at belonged to Simon Job. An idea that I took away from his blog was using a student response network. I loved this idea becuase it gives a new way to assess students. I would take the stats from the days quiz and, depending on the unit, have the students use that information to create something. For example, if we were doing percents I would have them create a pie graph of the percent of students who chose each answer choice and then evaluate each question to give a reason to why someone might have chosen that answer. One of the last pages that I reviewed belonged to Jackie Ballarini. An idea that I took from her blog was from an activity she did. In this activity she asked her students three specific to help them investigate the behavior of rational functions. If I were to do this using a blog I make it an open discussion board for the students to participate in first before we came back whole group to discuss. I would have each student repsond to each of the three questions and to their peers. I enjoyed researching all of these different blogs.