It is surprising how life loops around returning to similar, perhaps familiar would be a more appropriate word, ideas. My first foray into developing curriculum using technology started in 1968 at a company called Ealing in their Film Loop division as their physical science and math editor. I was to teach single concepts, as we …
These two words have caught the imagination of educators and parents. They were designed to be the frames for talking about the value of digital learning. They were to replace the bland “individualized learning.” They were meant to symbolize a focus on the student, student-centered, and on that great American tradition, individual freedom. What surprises …
Walt Hunter was a quiet man, slight and balding with a Great Plains accent. You might mark him as a teacher, but likely not the dynamic personality with a certain brashness that you would think of as a “favorite” teacher. He did not convince me to change my major from physics to chemistry even though …
As mathematics takes an increasing role in work and life, creativity must become central to its learning, because: 1) creativity and creative problem solving are essential 21st century skills, 2) creativity drives engagement and enjoyment, and 3) creativity builds understanding. 1. 21st Century Skills: In survey after survey, business and STEM leaders rate creativity and …
Over the Rainbow by Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg is considered the greatest song of the century and the greatest song in a movie of all time, and it is my very favorite song. I never tire of listening to it. E. Y. ”Yip” Harburg wrote not only all of the lyrics for “The …
One of the four C’s, perhaps for many the most important 21st century skill, is considered in our schools, cheating. Students caught talking to each other during exams are either yelled at or disciplined for cheating. Homework is supposed to be an individual activity and students are punished for cheating if their paper looks like …
This picture was first published in 1638! It is from Galileo’s great work Two New Sciences, that he smuggled out of his home imprisonment in Florence, when he was 72 years old and effectively blind. Though famous for his telescope and the first images of the surface of the moon, he had not before published …
We call our problem solving process, functional thinking. When we apply functional thinking to problem solving in the digital age, we find that a few fundamental models give us the tools to creatively solve quantitative problems. Think of functions as LEGOs, add columns using new rules, use outputs as new inputs, combine simple functions in …
Scatterplot graphs enable us to build shapes using spreadsheets and to practice transformational geometry. They are surprisingly flexible tools. And since they depend upon a table of value and that table can have both fixed numbers and rules, we can not only build shapes but change them and watch the graph immediately reflect those changes. …
My fortune cookie today read, “If you’re happy, you’re successful.” Usually for me that is true, but not today. For during that same lunch my iPhone told me that Lynn Steen had died. I never had the good fortune to meet him in person or to even talk with him, but I loved him and …
