Thursday, March 20, 2014

Good Warm-up and started using Mathtoons apps.

Today I started class reminding the students about the dog bought in china a couple days ago for 12 million yen or 1.9 million dollars.  Then I asked the students to find the exchange rate for $1 US.  First thing half the students did was to go to the internet and find some currency exchange and came up with all sorts of answers.  I pointed out they had 12M yen and $1.9M so they had everything they needed.  It took a bit but they got the problem set up.  Then I asked how much the guy paid per pound if the dog weighed 200lbs which is the average weight for a Tibetan Mastiff.  At $9500 per pound, they thought it was a bit excessive.  What really took things home was when they figured an approximate volume based on some average info I was able to find and discovered he paid about $35 per cubic inch.  The conclusion was that you could do better things with your money......LOL.
I downloaded a bunch of Mathtoon apps today so I assigned one app to each period and had them start working through the quizzes and very few students scored well on material they should have known. 
My state test prep class, I gave number skills to and they had trouble with just adding positive and negative numbers.  Per 2 got to do the intermediate algebra part of the advanced algebra app.  Some struggled with it.  Per 3 did logs and it was not as much a quiz as a lesson and the students gained better understanding of logs using this app.  Per 4 tried geometry pro whose first quiz had them working with angles.  Per 6 did the first quiz in number equations and most students ended up between 2 and 7 right out of 10.  These apps are helping provide some formative data to help me understand where my students have gaps in their mathematical skills.  I am going to work them through all the quizzes and materials before I move them to another app.  I should probably have period 2 do the exponents app because we are just starting to work with polynomials.

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