Monday, September 08, 2008

Algebra 2: Rational Exponents

Mondays are exhausting. I have four 80-minute classes, a 45-minute advisory, a meeting during lunch to plan advisory, and a Leadership Team meeting after school. And then I have to plan for Tuesday. That's why it's 9 pm and I am just getting ready to go home now. Is this sustainable? Um...

So the lesson for tomorrow is on evaluating rational exponents. Lecture, practice, review, repeat. Hard to be creative sometimes... Anyway, here it is. Hopefully it can save you some time some day.

Lesson 6 (rational exponents)

Lesson 6 Keynote
Keynote Quicktime

8 comments:

H. said...

In your spare time (cough) - would you consider putting pdfs of the occasional Keynote presentation out there? In your spare time. I feel I'm missing out on something.

Dan Wekselgreene said...

You are missing out on something - the os x experience! anyway...

Actually, generating Quicktimes is really simple with Keynote. And they run just like the actual presentation. Let me know if you can't play them. I've gone back and added links in the previous posts.

I'd love to get some feedback on these presentations, especially since I'm putting so much time into making them.

H. said...

Now look at that. What one can get just for the asking. This is awesome. I love the way the indices and powers pop up piece by piece - just the way they should when you go over this with students.

This must be taking a godawful number of hours. I'll probably steal many of these wholesale (telling the kids, as with the Representational Fluency worksheets of last year, that they are from this math teacher in San Jose).

A formatting hint: For fractions raised to a power, you can get the brackets to resize to fit the fraction by entering the fraction into the bracket template in the equations editor instead of typing the braces separately.

Dan Wekselgreene said...

You're welcome. If you want to actually use them, I can generate a better quality quicktime - they are about 4 times larger, so I was generating the medium quality. But I can do requests, ya know?

Yes, many hours... and I know what you mean about the parentheses, but I actually can't get equation editor to work in keynote... so I am building the fractions piece by piece, separate parentheses, separate fraction bar, etc. Yuck.

Dan Wekselgreene said...

Oh, you know what? I just went back and tried it again... I had been trying to copy equation objects from my Word files, and that didn't work. But when I open up a MathType window, and copy from that, then I can paste it right in to Keynote. Humph. That should make things a lot quicker! The only problem then is that you can't edit the object once it is placed. Well, I'll play with it.

Anonymous said...

In playing with things, MathMagic does allow you to copy into Keynote easily and you can copy equations back to MathMagic for further editing. It is something else to spend money on, but since I just started using it this year, I'm still on the free trial.

Anonymous said...

Over 6 contact hours in a day? Your school doesn't plan on retaining teachers more than a couple of years, are they?

Jonathan

Dan Wekselgreene said...

Well, that is a serious issue that we have.. Although, 6 contact hours is only once per week. There are three days with 4 hours and 45 minutes, and one day with 2 hours and 40 minutes. It all works out to about 23 hours per week. Is this excessive? I have no idea... what is the per week contact hours in typical comprehensive high schools?