Visualizing Functions SummaryMonday - Friday, July 2 - 6, 2012The Functions Working Group met four times this week and began by introducing ourselves and talking about where and what we are teaching, and generally getting to know one another. We then started to familiarize ourselves with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP). We opened up a dropbox shared folder and began adding documents which we might find useful. Ashli Black came in to our group on Tuesday and told us more about her involvement with www.illustrativemathematics.org and explained to us the review process which is required for each lesson. She especially stressed the vetting process required to publish a lesson on the site, assuring us that any lesson which appeared there had been tested by more than one person. Ashli also told us about her work last year in the Functions Group whereby she traced the appearance of anything related to functions from kindergarten through high school. She also gave us some links to other websites, including one on which you can create animated figures and provide them with dialog to create short videos. On Thursday we continued to explore the materials on functions, including a Wordle representation of the standards which clearly indicated the importance of functions in the CCSS. We talked about screen-casting and watched videos made by two of our group members. On Friday, we decided to work on building a matrix with the rows being the items of mathematical content, and the columns being the mathematical practices. The items within the boxes of the matrix may include any number of things, especially if we design the matrix as a database. The box may contain an example, a document, a link to a website, a video or something else. For our week-end homework, we decided to each take a row and try to fill in the content for at least some of the mathematical practices. |