The highlight of the week was the Project Week presentation fair. I wrote about project week in some of my previous posts, and here is a video from last year’s Project Week. The work the students did was impressive to say the least. I scurried around this year as well getting as much footage as I could. It’s hard because there were 10 presentations going on at a time and the presentations were only 10 minutes long. I tried to get footage of at least two presentations every 10 minutes. The video was a ton of fun to put together, but I forgot how long it takes to sift through interview footage. I revised my Premiere Pro workflow a bit and created subclips of any interview segment I thought I might be able to use. It helped.
Here’s the video:
If you have any questions about how we make this happen, such as logistics of getting students prepared, accountability, or setting up the presentation fair, feel free to reach out. You can email me using the CONTACT tab on the top of the website. I love hearing from other educators!
MATH THIS WEEK
I’m getting into Ratios & Proportions with both 6th grade math and Pre-Algebra. The proportion problems will be a little more complex with the Pre-Algebra students and have very little whole number scale factors.
Example:
- 6th grade math: Thom takes 3 hours to edit 2 minutes of video. How many hours to edit 6 minutes of video?
- Pre-Algebra: Thom takes 3.2 hours to edit 2.5 minutes of video. How many hours to edit 10.3 minutes of video?
For both classes I did a few different 3-Act problems (you can read about my experience with 3-Act problems HERE). If you haven’t heard of them, they’re problems where you show a video that provokes quite a bit of questions and you give very little information at the forefront. You’ll then ask a particular question and then ask them what info they would need to answer that question. You then give them the info and they attempt to solve it, usually collaboratively. It’s such an amazing way to approach problem solving that feels much more meaningful.
For Math Skills, we did one where they had to figure out how long it would take a printer to print out a certain amount of sheets of paper (you can find it HERE)
For Pre-Algebra, we did a fun one called Finals Week.
Both were fairly successful, but I always get a little tripped up on Act 1 where you ask students ‘what questions do you have about this after watching it.’ I have a question in mind that I’m hoping they hit on, but inevitably I end up sifting through a lot of questions like:
‘why would anybody do that?’
or
‘where did he get that shirt’
Not as much of the more meaningful questions. When I say meaningful, I don’t necessarily mean mathematical. On Finals Week, students begin to inquire about the effects of the caffeine and how his weariness from studying throughout the week may have had an impact on the effectiveness of the caffeine.
If you teach math, check these 3-Act problems out. There’s a list of a ton of them HERE. I would watch Dan Meyer’s videos on how he walks through them to get a feel for it.
Happy Easter!
