Edutopia Links

I have known about Edutopia and George Lucas' work since I took my Computers in Education course in Farmington. Articles and videos frequently come up in class and were mentioned/shown several times at MAMLE. It made me realize I do not visit this site nearly enough on my own. There is an entire section of videos on middle level education (the articles are great too, but I prefer the video section). The idea of project based learning came up several times at MAMLE so I watched some videos on it and this is my feedback. (I do want to mention that Mike Muir reiterated to MAMLE attendees several times that you may not be able to do all these ideas at your school, but focus on the ones that you may be able to implement.)


This first video is about teaching math at an all boys school in Kentucky. It sparked my interest initially because we had talked about have single sex classes and recently Cony High School in Augusta has piloted all girls and all boys math classes. This video shares different classroom management and instructional strategies for working with the boys. I also enjoyed it because it is of a lesson from the CMP2 book Stretching and Shriking. My school uses this curriculum and I had never thought to teach this specific lesson with the manipulatives like he does. There is also a piece in this video where the instructor shows his homemade document camera. We are fortunate enough to have document cameras on every team, but this teacher did not let his lack of technology hold him back.

MAMLE also focused on the importance that student's learn in different ways. We need to value the different learning styles for students. In one of Mike Muir's presentations he mentioned that most students are bodily- kinesthetic learners or visually spatial learners and we tend to teach logically and linguisticly. This video highlights an interesting way to appreciate students' different learning styles.

RTI Presentation at MAMLE

A quick note and question for you all:

What are your questions about Math RTI? I am part of a panel discussion/ question and answer session for Math RTI at this year's MAMLE conference. We plan to talk about what our school is doing for Math RTI in the regular math class, through SKILLS block, and Title I. As well as what we can do to better serve the needs of our students. If you were going to go to this presentation, what would you like to hear/discuss?