When I used to give 50 minute lectures in my traditional classroom, I struggled with keeping my students attention for the entire time period. Just about every student would “check out” for a few minutes to stare at the clock or check their email on their phone. Even the students who were focused on the lecture had a hard time taking notes (diverting their attention) and listening to what I was saying. Have you ever looked at some of your student’s notes? It can be a very ugly mess. Many students have never really learned how to take notes. They blindly transcribe what is on the board as fast as they can and it often does not really sink in.
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Average Rates of Change and Verizon
Over the past few years, I have worked to keep the attention of my students in class (and online). This is no small task. In his book, Brain Rules, 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School, John Medina writes that “information is remembered best when it is elaborate, meaningful, and contextual.” This may seem obvious at first, but how does it play out in practice?
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Tax Rates in NC and LA
The activity I describe in the post on Continuous Tax Functions may be linked to real data to make an extended class activity. In this extension, students need to come up with the piecewise continuous function for a state. Once they have the function, they prove that it is continuous using the definition of a continuous function.
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Continuous Tax Functions
One of the disadvantages of using projects in a course is the time it takes to administer and grade. For many faculty members with large class sizes or large amounts of content to cover, it is not feasible to do a project over several weeks. Fear not! You can still incorporate realistic applications in your classes as activities.
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How to Make a Class Calendar in Google Calendar
Each semester I try to make my classes a little better than the previous semester. I try to be more efficient and to use technology in a way that makes me more accessible to students. For many years, I have used Word to make a basic class calendar with all of the due dates. I posted the calendar online as a PDF file. This calendar was convenient for my students since they could print it out and annotate it with their own schedule as needed. However, it is limited since updates require me to upload the entire calendar again. It also only shows the deadline with no other information.
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