Last week my school district received a very large donation of spiral bound notebooks from the Target Corporation. 5 full palettes, stuffed with lined paper notebooks, showed up at the loading docks, and news was quickly spread through the district of it’s availability. Not to underestimate the power of teachers in need of school supplies, I ran down to the loading area to grab some footage of the paper before it had been sent off to...

Traditional story problems are dull, disconnected, and often don’t offer much opportunity for students to work with material and challenges from the real world that may connect with them in an affective or meaningful way. Video story problems are an attempt to capture curiosity and examples of math and science from the real world, and bring them into the classroom, where students can provide narrative structure around their...

On February 11th, 2012, I woke up to 13 inches of fresh snowfall. The night before my driveway had all of half an inch of snow on it, and I was shocked to say the least! What multiplied my amazement even more was that an extremely narrow band of lake effect snow (no more than 5-10 miles across) was dumping this snow on my poor little town along Lake Michigan at an alarming rate. By the end of the event we had over 20 inches of snow on the...

The Video Story Problem Channel and concept have both been gaining steam since a small group of educators started collaborating on them in the fall. Currently there are almost 60 videos of math, science, and inquiry based problems that have collected over 4,000 views! That’s close to 70 views per video! I don’t want to applaud just the numbers we’re all amassing, because the learning and work that students are...

It’s been awhile since I created a video story problem (almost 2 months since the last one), but I’ve been thoroughly enjoying all of the video story problems being created and shared by students over on the Video Story Problem Channel. I have a few ideas in the works for how to take the videos and create a more easily replicable and practical way of integrating them into math and science instruction, but for now it’s...

I recently had the opportunity to spend a day volunteering for my daughter’s field day at school. Among the various athletic activities outdoors, there was also down time for the Kindergartners to rest, have a bit of snack, and play inside away from the sun. I got to spend one such down time at the “domino table”, playing with a brightly colored set of plastic dominos. As many children playing with dominos eventually do,...