Dan Meyer

Total 1628 Posts
I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

The Release Day: Emo Edition

or: Not Volunteering For Anything Ever Again

Things picked up for about an hour. I spoke with Bill Fitzgerald from OpenAcademic who narrated a tour of his DrupalEd, which came closest to the wish list I posted a few days ago. The user roles are well-defined from admin through teacher on to student. Anyone can register, though the new user role doesn’t receive any privileges until the admin validates, which effectively realizes this idea of a “walled garden” which I coined, defined, and copyrighted last post. The tools for teachers range from podcasts, wikis, blogs, social bookmarks.

Things took a sorry turn after 10h00 that release day, though, after Bill stopped holding my hand and I had to coast on my own limited enthusiasm and knowledge. And I swear, the blogosphere just exacerbated things. My mind is wide open on this one. I have been ready to be dazzled for several months now. I have been reading posts on all this for several months now and I have yet to get It.
(more…)

The Release Day

I’m lost. I’m pretty sure I can get un-lost in time to present, but a proper sales pitch requires a certain degree of expertise that exceeds the parameters of this assignment.

I find myself craving 37Signal‘s mantra of Do Less Better. Check the beautiful minimalism of their front page and then check the clutter on Moodle‘s. Then again, 37Signals isn’t open source or built for outside development, so: apples and oranges. Still, I kinda prefer apples.

Anyway, at 08h00 I set into Elgg, Moodle, Joomla, and Drupal.

(more…)

Tech Adventure 2007

I’ve become shy in my use of the word “irony,” nowadays, what with the Grammarati so trigger happy in pointing out its misuse. So let’s just say that, as the word is commonly understood, my current situation is the very definition of ironic:

In less than a month, I’ll be making a case to the math department, then the leadership committee, and then the faculty for integrating 21st-century educational technology into our high school.

Ironic?

(more…)

LeaderTalk Leader Board

LeaderTalk has been knocking ’em out of the park lately. Brian Saxton writes compelling insecurity in “Is this what I have to look forward to?Scott Elias gives an honest account of discipline from across the administrative divide. (Although his mandate to “Err on the side of the student” just makes me queasy.) And Greg Farr is far and away (heh) the byline I most anticipate on the board. He has a great recent post on the schizophrenic nature of the administrator, paying homage to statistics and AYP while staving off stat-insanity. Keep it up, gents and ladies, but could we puh-leeze get correct author credit in the RSS feed?

How To Assess

This is a math-related post. I’ve tried to keep it as broad-minded as possible because, as much as I believe I’ve found the best way to assess mathematics, I haven’t the foggiest how to translate it to other disciplines. And I need help.

(Prerequisite: It’s essential to assess math by concepts and skills rather than by chapters, for reasons I outlined here, but specifically in this case because assessing by concepts means I can remediate like a pro. A student comes in with a low overall grade in hand and I know exactly which of our (currently) 21 concepts are bringing her down. We tutor, we reassess, grades go up, comprehension goes up, everyone’s happy.)

Ranking a close second in importance to concept-based assessment is the selection of good concepts. Here’s where I almost went wrong this last week.

We’ve been assessing Cones (#19) for a couple weeks now. It’s a straightforward concept. All you need to find the surface area of a cone is the slant height (19 inches in the picture) and the radius of the circular base (7 inches).

(more…)