Calculator Update

After a few glitches, I'm finally able to give you a little bit of an update on how my fundraising is going. Thanks to some very generous donations from family and a few of my students' parents who responded to my back-to-school night pleas, I have now raised 60% of my goal amount. That's enough to buy a Navigator system so I can connect the calculators to my computer and transfer items back and forth, have the students do activities, give them quick poll questions to see how they're progressing, etc. I'm really excited about this system, because it will allow me to be more creative in my teaching and hopefully encourage more participation and engagement from my students. I also raised enough money to upgrade the face plates on the old classroom set of original Nspire calculators that the department is sharing. Finally, I have enough money to buy 10 of the newest Nspire CX calculators for my classroom. It won't be too bad having 3 students working on a calculator activity together. Not great, but better than nothing. I would like to buy 20 more of these calculators to complete my classroom set. This will cost about $2750. (Unfortunately, my original estimations were on the low end.)

I have a friend who teaches at another high school in our district and she has invited me to their after-school calculator workshops. The first one is in a couple of weeks. I've met quite a few of the teachers in her dept at other workshops and I've worked with the presenter before, so I'm excited to see all of them and hopefully get some good ideas that I can bring back to use with my classes.

Very exciting progress! Thank you to the those of you who donated! Until this week, I didn't know who had donated, so you'll be hearing from me personally very soon. I wanted to be sure to thank you right now. I really appreciate your support.

If anyone is still interested in donating, you can do so through my account at The Jefferson Foundation. Here's a link to my original post with the directions.
______________________________________________________

Quite often at teacher workshops, there is an option to do some more work outside of the workshop and earn graduate credit which can go toward recertification. In Colorado, teachers need to earn six graduate credit hours or 90 clock hours of professional development every five years. Remember the "calculator camp" I went to in Colorado Springs this summer? I decided to go for the one credit hour offered with that workshop.

I thought my assignment was due today, but found out that it was due last Friday. Yikes! Luckily, I was able to get an extension. I had a plan for an activity in my mind, but still ended up staying up until 2:30 AM on Tuesday night because I needed to finish grading first. Uff-da! Thanks goodness for afternoon naps.

The inspiration for my activity came from an article I read on NPR's Planet Money blog. It talks about Warren Buffet investing in Bank of America. I really liked the simplicity of the graph they presented and wanted to use the data capture feature on the calculator to run regression on the data. This is a topic we've been covering in both my Algebra 2 and Algebra 3 classes lately. I was able to pull their graph into my calculator software and put together a pretty good activity. I need to put some more work into finalizing a project I'm creating for my Algebra 2 students. It will be similar to this project, but I plan to pull data from several different stocks so that different students will be analyzing different stocks.

(By the way, I can't say enough good things about the Planet Money podcasts. I listen to them when I'm running and I find them very interesting and informative. Exactly what I need to take my mind off of running. I even emailed one of the staff members to find out more about where she pulled her stock market data. Not only did I get a response, but it was a very helpful and friendly response. Two thumbs up!)
















______________________________________________________

Finally, here's your reward for reading a blog post about calculators...
Can you believe tomorrow is October 1st? I'm enjoying the changing colors that the boys and I get to see on our runs. Despite the somber faces, the boys really do seem to enjoy getting out and about. Maybe they wish they had jobs so they could buy me some calculators. Don't worry, boys. You make your mama very happy.