RIMS CTAP DPLC

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

“Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover”

Today’s math curriculum is teaching students to expect — and excel at — paint-by-numbers classwork, robbing kids of a skill more important than solving problems: formulating them. At TEDxNYED, Dan Meyer shows classroom-tested math exercises that prompt students to stop and think.

Dan Meyer asks, “How can we design the ideal learning experience for students?” As a part-time Googler, a provocative blogger and a full-time high-school math teacher, his perspective on curriculum design, teacher education and teacher retention is informed by tech trends and online discourse as much as front-line experience with students.

Meyer has spun off his enlightening message — that teachers “be less helpful” and push their students to formulate the steps to solve math problems — into a nationwide tour-of-duty on the speaking circuit.

“I teach high school math. I sell a product to a market that doesn’t want it but is forced by law to buy it.” — Dan Meyer

Saw this recently and thought it was a cool way of conceptualizing large numbers:

A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. A trillion seconds is 32,000 years.

There’s also the super-awesome MegaPenny Project:

Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: “What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?”

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too.