Free to use, looks very cool, and looks like some opportunities to play with data in new ways. I’m wondering what data sets people may find to play with, and whether some shared lesson plans might emerge. Or perhaps it gives new opportunities for students to collect data and find patterns. Or perhaps a Google Document spreadsheet could be shared between several classrooms for larger-scale data collection on something of interest. . .

Just thought I would plant the seed here since it’s such fruitful ground for innovation.

someone’s struggled with your ideas…
comes to some resolve and restates your thinking…
someone else feeds off that restatement…
and makes their own new statement/revelation/question…
originator feeds off all the above..

rinse and repeat.

The more we adults can embrace the type of learning we want our kids to experience…the more authentic for everyone. Dan is providing a most authentic professional development experience for those taking advantage of it. Let’s all try to get more pd happening this way…

my crazy question….
….is the curriculum getting in the way?
I mean I love what Dan wrote here:
I’m all for letting this unfold organically, but class time is too scarce to leave this entire thing to chance. We need some kind of plan for your students – a series of questions, an activity – in case we need to prompt their imaginations.

in trying to address that – i’m drawn towards another question…
….is seat time getting in the way?
How cool would it be if we weren’t forced to imagine/create on the spot, all together at one time. Like we’re saying – here’s a room with parameters… now be creative/imagine – on this one topic. Just curious where we could go without these limitations. Curious how truly natural learning is.

And back to the first…
Without a curriculum.. would we be swimming (a good thing) in a more relevant math… today – calculus pops in and we address it… rather than so compartmentalized per scaffolding of a curriculum. Would we feel successful in coverage?…Would that force a more relevant curriculum?.. And can that scenario only happen with an expert individual tutor – as opposed to a classroom setting?…

I’ve created a lot of WCYDWT lessons that I’ve never used in a classroom. I haven’t taught geometry in two years. It’s been four years since I taught math analysis. And I’ve never taught calculus.

Still, I capture and create lesson that exist outside my current, limited scope of “remedial algebra” for two reasons that are quickly obvious to me:

1. I’ll use them eventually.
2. I need to keep these creative muscles limber and toned.

Idea goes in. Photos, videos, and lesson plans go out. I need to keep that circulatory system moving, otherwise it gets harder and harder to create.

I suspect it takes a pretty considerable understanding of the curriculum in order to identify where these great WCYDWT opportunities would fit best and to integrate them most effectively.

Given my relative inexperience teaching math though, I would love to be proven wrong.