Week 3

Sirs Discoverer: Looking up hedgehogs, we found many fiction stories and non-fiction articles about hedgehogs. The option of emailing an article to a student or myself is a great feature, especially for group collaboration.  The color coded reading ability scale makes it easy for students to find an article or story on their level.

From the Home page, it’s easy to navigate to any country by using the sidebar.  Mexico was the country of choice to research.  The first page gives general information about the country and a condensed history.  There are many interactive links to further explore topics dealing with Mexico. I chose Mayas and many articles were listed, again with the color-coded reading levels.  The articles also contained Lexile scores.

Maps of the World on the sidebar pulls up 47 different maps of Mexico, ranging from historical maps to pictures of Mexico.

Educators’ Resources led me to Curriculum Tools where the Skills Discoverer link revealed games and activities for several subjects including math.  Interactive videos and games made this a fun site to explore.

One Common Core link was visual 3D geometry representations of polyhedrons which directly addresses the properties and relationships in geometry.

SIRS Issues Researcher: I looked for ‘Flipped Classroom’ and ‘Mass Customized Learning’ , hot topics in math education, but came up with no results.  Search results for ‘Algebra’ listed several articles, mostly about the importance of Algebra and where we are failing in American Education.

Curriculum Pathfinders: Math: The History of Math was fun to explore.  Since Pi day was in March, I read some articles on the history of Pi, which were very interesting.  There was also the option of printing the article.  There are also helpful tools for math: calculators, math exercises, math games.