Continuous formation

Another little conference this weekend; close to home, fortunately. It turned out to be a lot of same-old, same old though: The powers-that-be don’t want us to use social media, or if they do, they haven’t a clue how to do it they just want a Twitter account or Facebook page. There are huge issues with privacy. We’re not really sure of the effectiveness of the money we’re investing but very vocal people tell us it’s working. Interestingly enough, this wasn’t an education conference; it was for entrepreneurs and marketing folk. PodCamp Toronto 2010 was an un-conference in which people put themselves down as presenters on whatever topic they wanted and the costs were picked up by generous sponsors such as Rogers and GM. A call-out to Rogers for setting up a recharging station for devices – a nice touch if you forgot your charger at home. What I took away, and this is a big tent, was that businesses are very serious about making money using social media, that they desperate...

Fortunately, we're doing slopes in our MPM1D course and I knew I'd be away for Educon for a day so I continued the adaptation of a slope assignment from last year. Last year things were strictly 2D. First, they went into groups, each with two sheets of blank 8.5x11. On each page, they were told to place two dots randomly (next year, maybe only one dot). From there, they were to draw concentric rough circles. A few students picked up that they looked like topographical maps -- sure enough, when I had them count from 0 going up by 500ft (yes, feet) they quickly agreed they were topo maps. I then quickly dropped the maps into my scanner at home and posted the JPGs to our Ning. From the digital copy, each student planned their own ski run, taking into account whether they were looking for something easy or hard. I'm not a skier but there was lots of discussion of diamonds and circles and green and black. They then worked on analyzing their runs... what's the slope of...