MSM-134-Advisory and a Way with Words




Middle School Matters show

Summary: Jokes: Best Signs Listeners: Dave Bydlowski: thanks for the email. Looking forward to hearing from you throughout the year! Go Science! (David’s Podcast) From the Twitterverse: Advisory: Making Hard Decisions: What would your students do if they discovered that they had broken a rule? http://www.pgatour.com/2010/r/09/02/teenager-disqualified.ap/index.html Career Path Discussion: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703466704575489773416987814.html Tech Tools: Basic Google Search that everyone should know: 10 Basics tips to make your google searching better and easier. http://www.techlearning.com/article/32300 Wordia http://www.wordia.com/ SnappyWords Free visual English dictionary. An online interactive English dictionary and thesaurus that helps you find the meanings of words and draw connections to associated words. You can easily see the meaning of each by simply placing the mouse cursor over it. http://www.snappywords.com/ DocDroid DocDroid is a completely free online document uploading, conversion and sharing tool. * Upload documents in nearly any format. * Share the document via eMail, Twitter or Facebook. * Fast HTML preview for readers. * Let the reader choose in which format he wants to download the document. * Multiple file upload is possible. * Password protection is possible. * Supported formats: PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, PAGES, RTF, OTT, XLS, XLSX, TXT, PPT, PPTX, ODP and more! * Documents can be deleted by you or are deleted after 60 days without view. http://www.docdroid.net/ Webspotlight: Free Teaching History Poster You can order a FREE historical thinking poster. They also have resources for elementary, middle and high school. http://teachinghistory.org/ Math Fun Facts This archive is designed as a resource for enriching your math courses and nurturing your interest and talent in mathematics! Each Math Fun Fact is a math puzzle or short article that contains a cool mathematics idea. You'll can learn about the mathematics of things like card shuffling to poker to computer vision to fractals to music, just to name a few. This makes great enrichment material for gifted math students or problem-solving groups. http://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ Commonly misheard expressions From a friend Down Under. Still a great discussion. http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2010/09/ten-misheard-expressions-to-avoid-in-your-writing/ Classroom Secrets- Taking My Students on a Classroom Tour By Marsha Ratzel The first tour stop is the “Start of Class Procedure and Class Agenda,” projected on my interactive whiteboard. I’m not sure the procedures and routines of Room 66 are worth much, monetarily speaking. But collectively they maximize our learning time together by allowing us to accomplish the administrative tasks quickly, efficiently, and without trauma to students. I estimate that they give me an extra 4-5 minutes of class time every day – which means I’m able to squeeze out an extra day of instruction every 10 days. Since we are in school for 10 months, that means I’m creating nearly 18 extra class periods of instruction versus someone who doesn’t use these kinds of tricks. That’s almost a month of extra instructional time in each class. http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2010/09/15/tln_ratzel.html?tkn=ZRZF%2FCsty6RQ0ltMWceCfc%2B5%2FYBAcGhCp00l&cmp=clp-edweek News: Did Bill Gates waste billions of dollars over math errors? Did Bill Gates waste a billion dollars because he failed to understand the formula for the standard deviation of the mean? Howard Wainer makes the case in the entertaining Picturing the Uncertain World (first chapter with the Gates story free here). http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-small-schools-myth.html ISTE 2010 Events & Happenings: Calendar of Events: NMSA News: Other News: