How To Make Activities More Doable During Distance Learning.

Many of us have taken distance classes so we know for us, it often means sitting through a video based class for a couple of hours, scribbling down notes while trying to process everything the professor said.  We know that won't work with most of our students and it isn't necessarily a best practices method for teaching math.

We face the big issue of trying to construct lessons that will involve our students in something more than listening for 55 minutes while you lecture or at least try to have students reply. Fortunately, there are some ways to increase student involvement in class but it requires a bit of forethought and planning.

If you teach geometry, have students bring cereal boxes to class to measure calculate volume or surface area.  Ask them if they have soda cans, bottles,  or circular oatmeal boxes so students can relate formulas to real items rather than something out of a book.  If your school is sending materials home with lunches, see about including rulers, protractors, paper, and scotch tape so students can create their own nets for any of the standard 3 dimensional shapes.  

What about sending maps home so students can use ratios to calculate the distance between two cities using the key on the map.  If it is 1 inch = 50 miles, students can use the ruler to measure the distance between say Chicago and New York, set up the ratios to find the total distance a crow might fly to get there.  Take it one step further by having students look up the average speed of say a crow and let them figure out how long it would take it to fly the distance.

Let students plan a meal for their family and then using on-line sites or a printed list, let them investigate the cost of each item so they can determine how much a meal might cost.  In addition, ask them to scale up or scale down the recipe to feed say 2 people or 80.  Real life math.

Since most student have phones, let students call different phone copies to find out the costs of a couple of plans to determine which is better, or ask students to call the local cable or satellite companies to get the cost of various packages such as cable, internet phone, etc so they can figure out if buying them separately versus the whole package is a better deal.  Let them look at satellite costs to see if buying a package with everything is better cost wise versus buying a basic package and paying extra for one or two channels is better.

This is the perfect opportunity for the students to work together to create a "newsletter" to share various mathematical topics with their parents.  Each student can choose a topic and create an article to explain it so their parents can read about it.  Have your students select a stock from the stock market.  Each day, they can check the price and they can create a scatter plot over a two to three week period.  At the end of the time, they can calculate a line of best fit for these points.

This is the perfect situation to use twitter, facebook, or instagram type activities so students can share the results of various activities, questions, discoveries, impressions.  Matt Miller from Ditch The Textbook has templates for these social media outlets.  Take advantage of student knowledge of social media to engage them with questions, problems, etc.

Look around you.  Check on what the students have access to.  Look at what things students might have around the house to incorporate into the lesson so they are more engaged. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.