Ian Garrovillas attended my spring session in Oakland on integrating digital media into a math classroom and kinda missed the point. His take-away:

[Halloween] was Friday, a review and quiz day. Rather than merely putting up review questions on the board that our class could try and discuss, I interspersed screen shots of scary movies…

I let the image sit on the screen for a mere 3 or 4 seconds, acting as if I was unaware, before I moved onto the next slide. Got a few students with it. Lovely.

Okay, maybe that is pretty funny.

Among other guiding principles for this Internet timesuck I call dy/dan, this has been the enduring hope: that if I’m as transparent as possible, as honest as possible, and if I upload as many supplemental materials as possible, then you and I can turn losses into wins.

So yesterday I posted my entire Geometry curriculum online: geometry.mrmeyer.com.

The whole year. 1.94 gigabytes. Every lesson plan. Every handout. 2,144 slides – flavored in Keynote, PowerPoint, and PDF.

I hope you can use this or, at least, that you know someone who can use this, in which case, please pass it along.

Dina Strasser, killing me in the comments of the last post:

Was I NOT just up til midnight last night scavenging Youtube for lit term videos??!

Thinking to myself, “{expletive redacted}. No one’s done this yet to my satisfaction… something *else* I need to do?!?”

And then this.

Educators will understand that it is not the mere synchronicity, but the fact that my workload has been LIGHTENED that confirms the hand of God at work here.

Or the hand of Todd Seal, a high-functioning blogger. Can we all get with this program?

Todd’s

I love this. Todd has quietly collated 26 video files and mapped them to a list of 30 literary terms.

20. personification – Comcast: Stop Worrying About Time [D/L], Epuron: His Potential Is OursAn awesome commercial which Todd and I discussed almost a year ago. [D/L]

Johan’s

Elsewhere, Johan earns a dy/dan merit badge for polishing off the complete archives in under a fortnight (skipping and skimming frequently, I hope) and for finding classroom application in an old show and tell video:

This is what I call epiphany: I just realised the chocolate bunny video [“How to kill a chocolate bunny” will be a perfect way to introduce the types of heat transfer in my physics class

Yours

Certain videos are more substantial than others but the fact is this: someone somewhere is using your content area to create the culture your students consume daily. This has always been the case but only recently could you download it, play it, and talk about it.

So love what you teach and sharpen your eyes to find what you love embroidered within the fabric of popular culture. Don’t present these videos to your students as gimmicks or, worse, as winking concessions to their allegedly lowbrow tastes. These videos are important to them, which makes them important to you.

Like yesterday, buying gas. I started spinning this credit card advertisement and something about it didn’t make sense. I stared at it, cocking my head back and forth like a magpie. Then I saw the two different radii and laughed at myself.

A year ago, that would’ve ended it, but nowadays – I don’t know. Even during the summer, I can’t turn this thing off, this thing which I tried to illustrate in my second vodcast. I grabbed my Canon PowerShot and shot some video. Then I dumped it into Adobe AfterEffects and added some clarifying visuals.

I’ll play it someday next year at some moment when I’d like them to scratch their heads over how one circle has more circles inside of it. I’ll ask them to make their own, maybe, or maybe we’ll just enjoy the moment, a moment when we brought the world into our math class with video.

Clever Circles from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.