Welcome to Dave’s Digital Magic #5

Here are 5 links for you to explore.

1. THE FEATURE OF THE WEEK!

26 Learning Games to Change the World

To be honest, the only one I’ve tried is Free Rice, and I wrote about it here.

If you use and like another one, please let me know!

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2. GLOBAL ISSUES… continued

World on Fire – by Sarah McLachlan

A typical music video costs about $150,000. Sarah only spent $15 on her World on Fire video, and then she took $148,270 and spent it in ways that positively impacted the lives of thousands of needy people! (Donations list)

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3. MORE ON MATH

The Math Playground

If you click on the K-7 Mathcasts you will get to see Voicethreads in action... (I linked to Voicethread in Digital Magic #2)

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4. STAR WARS

R2D2 in the classroom?

OK Lawrence, this one is for you, although I have to say, “I want one too!”

Sorry to say there is no money in our budget to get these into our school.

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5. THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMMMMM…

Academe’s Dirty Little Secret

This blog post is written by Darren Kuropatwa, a brilliant high school Math teacher.

Here is an excerpt:

“You can require your students to demonstrate their understanding of what they are learning by having them apply their knowledge analyzing and evaluating relevant novel situations or problems. Better yet, get them to create content that educates an interested learner and they will automatically incorporate all those levels of engagement while they make their learning sticky. I don’t need to tell you that there’s nothing like having to teach a thing to make you really learn it.

Darren walks the talk! His students will go home and spend hours helping to teach others, when it is there turn to scribe the class notes and post them on a blog for the other students in their class. You can see this in his Scribe Hall of Fame… or if you aren’t into Math, just check out the link to the article.

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Did you miss an edition of Digital Magic? Is there one you want to look back on again? Here are all the editions of Digital Magic in reverse order, (most recent first).

Have a great week!

A round table has four deep pockets equally spaced around its perimeter. There is a cup in each pocket oriented either up or down, but you cannot see which. The goal of the game is to get all the cups ‘up’ or all the cups ‘down’. You do this by reaching into any two pockets, feeling the orientation of the glasses, and then doing something with them, (you can flip one, two, or none). However, as soon as you take your hands out of the pockets the table spins in such a way that you can’t keep track of where the pockets you have visited are. If the four glasses ever get oriented all up or all down a bell rings to signal you are done. Can you guarantee that you will get the bell to ring in a (maximum) finite number of moves, and if so, how many?

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You can find out more about Numeracy Tasks in my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog.
I will tag all tasks like this with Numeracy so that they are easy to find in one location.

Please feel free to post questions or your best answer in a comment… but do not ruin the challenge for others by explaining how you got to that answer here! If you feel compelled to share your method, please do so by contacting me. Thanks!

You have two glass orbs of equal strength and a 40 story building.
Your task is to determine the highest floor from which you can drop an orb without it breaking.
What is the least number of drops required to do this?
Both orbs may be broken in order to determine your answer.
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You can find out more about Numeracy Tasks in my ‘Pair-a-Dimes’ blog.
I will tag all tasks like this with Numeracy so that they are easy to find in one location.

Please feel free to post your questions or best answer in a comment… but do not ruin the challenge for others by explaining how you got to that answer here! If you feel compelled to share your method, please do so by contacting me. Thanks!

Image: ‘Sphere_2720′by doviende

With the tag, all project photos can be seen in a single space.

A description of the project by Cool Cat Teacher is here.

The Trig. assignment/Ruberic developed by Darren Kuropatwa is here.

What a great assignment to do for Fractions or Geometry!

The use of Hotspots is what really ties the photo to the learning!
(‘Add Note’ on a Flickr photo).

This is “Tenny’s trig” photo from Darren’s class. (With Hotspots Here)

This can be used in Art and quite frankly, across the curriculum, but I really like the potential for using it in Math. Congrats to Darren – this is brilliant!