An Interactive Notebook (IN) is a bound notebook, typically a composition book or spiral notebook that a student uses for notes, practice, and reflections during a course.

The interactive-notebooks Wikispace is a great place to start.

Here are the rules I give the students:

• The right pages are for input, left pages are for output. That means I’ll often give you notes on the right and you’ll practice or reflect on the left. [Teachers: Write lesson plans, including planned pages where everything goes.]
• Number each page as you use it. Put a title and date on every page and enter the title on your Table of Contents. [Teachers: maintain your own classroom copy of the book. Students love to look at your example, especially when they've been absent. To keep 'em honest, I like to NOT answer the problems.]
• Never go on to the next page unless directed by your teacher. If you need more space, glue loose leaf paper to the bottom of the page and fold it up. [Teachers: keep loose-leaf paper available for students. Try to anticipate when a problem set will be too long for the space you've allotted.]
• Use pencil and colored pencil only in the IN because marker and highlighter both bleed through the page. [Teachers: keep colored pencils available in the classroom for use on a daily basis.]
• Use tape or gluestick only because staples add unnecessary bulk and sometimes rip the pages. [Teachers: again, keep these available for regular use.]

I like to keep my extra copies in this wall organizer. The sticky notes and a marker live near the organizer and I often ask a student to keep it organized. (In my picture, you see orange for math and green for physics.)

From School Stuff

I attach handouts into the IN several different ways. Here’s the easiest: se a gluestick to paste the back of the handout into the notebook, sideways. Super-duper cool tip: use the “print 2 pages on 1″ option of your printer to get stuff half-size — it fits on a IN page with no folding.

From School Stuff

For the warmup or bellringer activity, sometimes I provide kids with the problem on a slip of paper, to be pasted in. You can get a bunch of problems on one page this way.

We do a reasonable number of foldables in my class. They can also be placed in the IN several ways. One is with the pocket. I like to ask kids write a reflection or conclusion on the bottom few lines, below the pocket. The pocket is also a great place to store lab reports, graphs, or other work that was done outside the notebook.

From Phone uploads

A cutsey pocket can be made of construction paper and stapled in the back cover (glue would be too fragile). Here’s mine:

From School Stuff

I don’t think much of what I do in the classroom could be described as artsy-craftsy. Ok, probably nothing is artsy-craftsy. That purple pocket above is about as cutsey as I’ve ever done.

Aside from being crafty (and therefore appealing to that type of student), the IN helps everyone stay organized. We don’t lose assignments, forget to bring the vocabulary flash cards to class, or need a sheet of paper (that will inevitably get lost).

In part 2, I’ll talk about how I manage grading work if the kids have all their papers with them all the time.

I’ve included the project below for you to enjoy steal. [Galileo's Ramp (Word, 622kb)]

I start the kids off with understanding position-time and velocity-time graphs

Here’s a little snip:

Later, we move into understanding how quadratic functions can be transformed

There’s more in the full version (I guess that’s kinda obvious). Hit the link above.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to @occam98, @fnoschese, and @jsb16 for brainstorming with me via Twitter the other night. Y’all were amazing. I opened with, “give me some phenomena that fit a quadratic function.” Also, I would never have finished writing this project tonight if I hadn’t had a horrible day at work. Something about a lousy day makes me want to do better the next.

This project gets students to understand position-time and velocity-time graphs in a rudimentary way, gets them thinking about the quadratic equations that describe those graphs, and helps them begin to understand how to collect data accurately.

I’m returning to Mac mountain after many years in Windows world and Linux land (remember OS 8?). Relearning things as simple as keyboard shortcuts (CTRL+SHIFT+Q nearly gave me a heart attack in ActivInspire) and a backwards mouse (yeah, I understand gestures and still think it’s backwards) are definitely interesting experiences.

Act 1: [mp3 | 8M] The hosts lay out the story of Jericho, where an Israelite army brought the walls down, supposedly by shofar (a ram’s horn) blasts. Along the way, we learn about the logarithmic decibel scale. In the final seconds of this clip, we get to the question that all my students were already asking: what would it really take?*

Act 2: [mp3 | 8M] Wherein David Lubman, the acoustical scientist consulted by the hosts, reveals how many shofar blowers it would take to bring down the walls.

Act 3: Continue playing the Act 2 file to explore issues of how to focus the sound and the physics of sound cannons.

*At this point, my kids set to the calculations. They wanted to know if there was a faster way. It was a beautiful experience where the kids asked me to take them from brute-force-arithmetic to honest-to-goddess upper level math. Then I hit play on Act 2. In the words of the experts in this podcast, “there’s a problem.” Just as my class noticed (and demanded we contact the Radiolab folks), another teacher noted a problem in Act 2′s big reveal:

Steven from Palo Alto

How fast can you go around that turn safely?

Georgia Performance Standards: SP1g

SP1. Students will analyze the relationships between force, mass, gravity, and the motion of objects. g. Measure and calculate centripetal force.

The idea of the real game is to get your partner to guess a word by describing without using any of the five taboo words, which are usually the first words that anyone would go to in a description. So the obvious math equivalent is to pick a term that you are throwing around in your class and get students to describe it without using their go-to math descriptors.

     Please go read the entire original post.

As someone who teaches courses made of 60% English Learners and 40% students who failed math last semester, I’m eager to put this game out there. My students may just enjoy this one.

Dude, I love the comment that students make the Taboo cards.

Can you help me make this into a 3 Acts problem? I was thinking some thing along these lines:

• Act 1: movie clip of someone trying to crack a combination lock. I want to set up the question “how long will it take?”
• Act 2: What are the rules for these combination locks? Maybe I could even be so lucky as to find these listed on a website with the number of permutations.
• Act 3: Which lock will take longer to crack?*

Standard schmandard…

Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) for Math: MM1D1b
MM1D1. Students will determine the number of outcomes related to a given event. b. Calculate and use simple permutations and combinations.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan is happening right now through August 31. To help you through the month when Muslims fast from sun-up to sun-down, I’ve put together a RamaFAQ.

1. What is Ramadan? The holiday celebrates Islam’s greatest prophet, Mohammed, receiving Allah’s revelation for humankind. To observe, students may be fasting from sun-up to sun-down. That includes no drinking water. As with any religious observance, not all Muslim students will participate in fasting. Some of our younger students may have trouble concentrating. I recommend giving a restroom pass so they can refocus.

2. When is Ramadan? Because the Muslim calendar is lunar, Ramadan moves around the year. It could be any time. This year, it’s August 1-31. At the end of Ramadan is a holiday called Eid. Many of our Muslim students will be out of school to celebrate for up to 3 days.

3. How do I wish a kid Happy Ramadan? You could say “Happy Ramadan”. If you want to make a kid smile, greet him or her with “Ramadan Mubarak” (Ramadan’s blessings on you) or “Ramadan Kareem” (um, I’m not sure).

4. Where can I read a little more about this holiday? This Washington Post article is fun and educational.

I think I’m going to be a floater.

Which really sucks because I have this guy with no place to put him:

What advice do you have for me?

Stuff I am worried about:

1. Feeling discombobulated as I rush into a room to get set up in time for the kids.
2. Feeling like a guest all the time.
3. I will have a desk in one of the classrooms I float into. During my planning, that room will be in use. See #2.
4. How can I not use the rolling cart that makes teachers look like bag ladies? That is, how can I cleverly avoid carrying my crap around all day?
5. Dealing with the mess other teachers leave. I keep a tidy classroom. Some of my colleagues, less so.

How have you seen it done well? What pitfalls do I need to avoid?

Oh, and I go back to work on Tuesday, to a building with 50% more students than in May, to the year my classes’ English Learner population should tip 50%, probably to “float” into other teachers’ classrooms, to teach physics!, to my 8th year in the classroom, and with the best math department in the world. Am I ready? Heck no. Am I excited? Heck yeah!