http://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/re-redesigned-darren-kuropatwa-and-dan-meyer/

I think it’s because the concept ends up on some very “soft” math. I like the start but all you can end it on is a discussion of range? (And I guess you mean the statistical range, which is a distinction most teachers don’t make and certainly our state standardized test doesn’t, causing confusion in the future for students when they have to worry about domain and a completely different sort of range.)

Let me fiddle with end part and get back to you.

Kids don’t take too many notes in my classes. The slides are published to the class blog (example) each day, tagged as “slides” and “whatever unit they relate to”. The notes are always there for them when needed.

I try to minimize the amount of time I spend at the front of the room. I colour code my slides (purple = instructional, white = student work). As I’m planning my lesson if I see more than two purple slides in a row I know I need to break that up with a white one. I sometimes break this rule when the slides are intended to be displayed in quick succession.

Kids are typically sitting in groups of 3 or 4. They work through each problem collaboratively and then one student goes up to the board to write the solution and then explain it to the rest of thee class. I’m typically at the back of the room or circulating mostly listening to the conversations and interjecting with the odd question here or there to push their thinking forward.

While I do some presenting when teaching I do my best teaching when not presenting.

Everything written on the board is preserved (taking advantage of that “marginal cost of extra slides” Dan mentioned) even, especially, the mistakes (so you might see the same problem repeated on 3 or 4 slides if we had that many different solutions or approaches to the problem). Each day one student will summarize what was learned in class by publishing what I call a Scribe Post to the class blog.

I love talking about instructional design. IMHO instructional design & presentation design have an intersection, each is informed by the other for the better, but they’re different.

@Darren Looking at those slides, I’m tempted to say that they might function better (and more Dan-ly) if you printed them off for students. I think for a presentation, text rich is overload, but your HS kids are fine readers (I assume) so they’d probably be happy to have some nicely thought out definitions or example problems ready on the page to attack with their own thoughts etc. I find presentations are far more engaging if there’s something going with it, something guiding kids/adults towards where you want their thinking. This also lends itself towards getting rid of the images (they don’t print well). You could possibly push the images in your presentations (at least the ones you want to keep) to new slides, put the text on old ones, then print the text slides, and project the images.