More real life possibilities for Math

After I wrote yesterday's post, I did a bit more research on sites that offer lessons and activities to connect math to the real world and stumbled across this post in Education World.  The author found 24 places on the internet divided into five different areas.  The first, collections of real world math activities, includes one where students from around the country wrote the word problems.  Then there are the online math activities with specific focus, online data sources (authentic data), math collaboration, and more real world math ideas at Education World.
I pulled up a few sites to check them out and was rather impressed with the ones I viewed.  Also some of the sites are no longer viable including one on using math with planes.  I thought this would be of interest to my students but it does not seem to be up and running, so check each one.
On the other hand, I did not see NASA's educational web page with some really awesome problems.
Enjoy.

This and That

I am back at school doing the inservice training.  Since my school needs to work on literacy that will be the focal point this year.  They are having us create a thermatic unit for the high school and we chose navigation so I am starting to research navigation apps that could be used on the iPad during the unit.  We are going to do it at the end of the year after testing.  I found one plan2nav that is a marine navigation app that allows people to plan journeys, look at high resolution photos of harbor entrances and, check tides and currents.  I will run this by one of our teachers in the high school who used to work as a boat captain for fisherman.  He is willing to work with both the science teacher and myself. 
I think I'll download this app tonight and run it by him tomorrow and we'll see what he says. If anyone knows how decent this one is or has used others, I'd love to hear from you.

• Plan voyages on the fly, chart your route, set waypoints and measure the distance for each leg of your journey.
• Check tides and currents and the weather with our free weather service for forecasts up to five days out.
• View high-resolution photos of harbor entrances, see your charts with shaded depth areas and detailed depth contours.

- See more at: http://smart-navigation.net/download-free-marine-navigation-app/?gclid=CPabjLOj_bgCFbF_QgodF2YA9Q#sthash.AL9ImCy8.dpuf

• Plan voyages on the fly, chart your route, set waypoints and measure the distance for each leg of your journey.
• Check tides and currents and the weather with our free weather service for forecasts up to five days out.
• View high-resolution photos of harbor entrances, see your charts with shaded depth areas and detailed depth contours.

- See more at: http://smart-navigation.net/download-free-marine-navigation-app/?gclid=CPabjLOj_bgCFbF_QgodF2YA9Q#sthash.AL9ImCy8.dpuf

Plan voyages on the fly, chart your route, set waypoints and measure the distance for each leg of your journey.

Check tides and currents and the weather with our free weather service for forecasts up to five days out.

View high-resolution photos of harbor entrances, see your charts with shaded depth areas and detailed depth contours.

- See more at: http://smart-navigation.net/download-free-marine-navigation-app/?gclid=CPabjLOj_bgCFbF_QgodF2YA9Q#sthash.AL9ImCy8.dpuf

• Plan voyages on the fly, chart your route, set waypoints and measure the distance for each leg of your journey.
• Check tides and currents and the weather with our free weather service for forecasts up to five days out.
• View high-resolution photos of harbor entrances, see your charts with shaded depth areas and detailed depth contours.

- See more at: http://smart-navigation.net/download-free-marine-navigation-app/?gclid=CPabjLOj_bgCFbF_QgodF2YA9Q#sthash.AL9ImCy8.dpuf

Project based vs menu driven learning?

I was looking at a link to project based learning ideas and realized for as long as I've been teaching and as long as I've heard of project based learning, I still am rather unclear about it.  This is even though I worked in a district with levels, end of level tests and the idea of moving towards project based learning.  From my understanding, you assign a project, have the students work through each part of the project and at the end, they turn in the final project and in the process, they have learned several to apply several math standards.  In menu driven learning, students are taught the material, given the menu to create several small projects based on learning styles to turn in for points. 
Where my thoughts are going with this is are they mutually exclusive.  Can you create the over all project and break the parts down into a menu so each student or groups of students will be able to create the final project using different smaller parts that works best for them.  I realize each project will have to broken down into steps so students are not overwhelmed but could each step have three different choices on how to accomplish it?  Since so many of my students are ESL, I have to do a break down so each student knows the steps they have to follow but not necessarily how to do each step.  For instance, when I assign the "Design your dream bedroom" I have them draw 6 scale drawings to show the 4 walls, floor and ceiling so I know where all the windows, doors, lights, and how the room itself looks.  I then have them create an estimate for the finishing cost of the room including flooring, paint, wall paper, ceiling tiles, etc.  I need to look at being able to combine both projects and menus to give students a better choice and increase their learning.