Friday, April 8, 2011

Thing #4 - A Visit to Thinkfinity

This morning I took a visit to http://www.thinkfinity.org/. This was my first visit and so I was unaware of the resources that were provided through this website and its content partners. After a few brief searches, I was impressed with the availability of so many useful interactive lesson plan ideas. Many of the resources are helpful for either teaching new concepts to your class or for providing ways for students to practice these concepts on their own. All of the teaching resources are available for free.

ACTIVITY #1 - Mean and Median

I teach a middle school math class and decided to see what Thinkfinity had to offer in the way of math activities. I soon came across an activity from NCTM that clearly demonstrated the relationship between mean and median. I posted a screen shot below and this activity is available by visiting: http://illuminations.nctm.org/ActivityDetail.aspx?ID=160


The mean and median exploration tool shown above is a great demonstration tool while teaching about averages and box-and-whisker plots. I think math students will also benefit by practicing with this tool on their own while at home or in your school's media center/computer lab.

Using the tool is easy and takes very little practice. You begin by dragging red dots on to a number line that extends from zero to one hundred. Each dot represents a whole number from your set of data. As you drag the dots on to the number line, the value of each dot is listed under the number line in the order in which you place the dots. With a click of a button, you have the option to arrange the data in numerical order within the table. As each dot is placed, the value of the mean and median are listed in blue and green. With only one dot on the line for one piece of data, the value of the mean and median are the same. As more dots are added and then moved around, students will be able to see how outliers affect the mean average while the median remains the same. An added value to this interactive tool is that after adding five pieces of data to the number line, a box-and-whisker plot is shown above the number line. Once again this allows students to quickly visualize how a set of available data correlates with the extremes, quartiles, and extremes of the box-whisker-plot.


ACTIVITY #2 - Planet Size Comparison

Next week my 6th grade science class plans to begin a unit on the solar system. I decided to see what Thinkfinity had to offer in this area and was not disappointed. Among other things the website directed me to an interactive tool for planet size comparison. This tool, which is provided by ScienceNetLinks can be found by clicking the following URL: http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/messenger/psc/PlanetSize.html


The planet comparison tool allows students to visually compare the sun, earth's moon, or any of the planets of our solar system by their size, shape, and color. Students simply need to select two planets that they would like to compare and then click on the compare button. In addition to visually seeing a comparison between the two planets, the students are also given the diameters of the planets as well as the ratios between them. This planet comparison tool is a quick, easy way for students to explore planet relationships in regard to shape and size.

There are so many other available tools that can also be easily  located through using Thinkfinity. For example, below is another helpful tool for the study of the solar system on the topic of orbit and rotation. This tool also comes along with a page of instructions and lesson plan ideas. Thinkfinity connects educators to a variety of engaging resources that will certainly enhance any teacher's lesson plans.  



Link to the Lesson Plan on Orbit and Rotation:


The Marzano teaching and learning strategies that students will applied while students explore and learn from activities provided through Thinkfinity are listed below:
Marzano 9:

8 - Generating and Testing Hypothesis
9 - Utilizing Questions, Cues, and Advanced Organizers

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