It’s March 14th. Pi Day!!! Here’s a nice pi-ku for you:
Also, in the greater Northeast, it is Snowpocalypse 2017. So far about 9 inches have fallen with another 15 or so on the way.
We’ve been exceptionally busy lately here at eMATHinstruction. I’m going to switch things up a bit in this newsletter and give you the news first and discuss add-ons second.
On the Common Core Geometry front we’ve been moving ahead nicely. We just received the first formal proof for the book.
That means once we’ve done one more round of editing it will be ready to go to press. We’ve also finished the rough draft of the answer key and will continue to work on it as well. We hope to have both workbooks and answer key subscriptions available for purchase by Memorial Day weekend. In our store, it appears that both the workbooks and answer keys have been sold out when in fact they aren’t even for sale yet. But, we can create Quotes for the two products if any schools need these for next year’s budgets.
Most of our time and energy now is being devoted to producing the Common Core Geometry videos. We will have full length lesson videos for each of the 95 lessons in the curriculum. We are now using a SMART Board and screen capture technology because of the more tactile approach to Common Core Geometry.
Videos will be posted as they are finished. Our target is to be done with all videos by July 1st. We will certainly have many of them posted before that time, so if students need refreshers on how to do various constructions or other topics, point them to our Common Core Geometry Course, which is now officially on our Home Page:
During the next two months, we will be very busy recording the videos, so it may take more time to get an email response and we will likely be able to take less calls than normal. We do promise to get back to everyone who communicates with us as fast as we can. Just please be patient with us as we head into the final stages of Common Core Geometry.
We also have news on the New York City front. With the help of the good, and extremely patient, people in the New York City Division of Contracts and Purchasing (DCP) and Instructional Materials Review Unit (IMRU) we are very close now to having our materials listed on ShopDOE/FAMIS. They are now reviewing our books and we hope they may be listed by the end of March or early April. We are fairly certain that NYSTL approval will come shortly afterwards. But, to be honest, we are still a bit confused about that process (no great surprise).
We’ve got new add-ons this month for our three main courses. For Common Core Algebra I Add-Ons we have two new additions this month. We’ve got a Unit #10 Formative Assessment Form B exam. That’s our unit on Statistics, so this is a nice beefy make-up modeled on the original. On top of that, we also spent a great deal of time this last month uploading all of our videos onto TeacherTube. We’ve heard throughout the years that some schools block YouTube. My district of Arlington never did block YouTube, or if they did they unblocked it many years ago. Anyhow, all of our links on our site will continue to be YouTube links. But for this month I created a TeacherTube Hyperlinked Table of Contents so that teachers and students can easily find the video they want.
For Common Core Algebra II Add-Ons it is a similar story. First up we have the Unit 12 Formative Assessment Form B. This assessment is for our unit in Probability, so we are getting close to the end of the course with this one. Next month, when we hit Statistics, we plan to offer a Form B assessment as well as a packet of statistical simulation results that you can work with your kids on interpreting. Finally, we also have posted the TeacherTube Hyperlinked Table of Contents for that course as well.
For Algebra 2 and Trigonometry Add-Ons, we continue our trend of adding on Formative Assessment for the course. We never did this when we originally created the course some nine years ago. For this month we’ve added on the Unit 12 Formative Assessment (Statistics) and the Unit 13 Formative Assessment (Sequences and Series). We’ll have to think hard about what to add-on for the April and May rounds. Perhaps reviews quizzes?
Alright. Well, I hear the first round of blowing snow off my driveway coming. Stay safe and warm and have a happy Pi-Day! Lest we end this newsletter on anything but an odd note, here are three pies singing the digits of pi in Finish thanks to Phineas and Ferb: