ECST Mathematics Department
Newsletter
March 13-17, 2023
Newsletter
March 13-17, 2023
ACTIONABLE ITEMs
You are asked to set up an account with Arete Labs in order to then set up the upgraded account. To set up an account, go HERE . The Arete Labs Class Match feature will be used during our MATH MADNESS COMPETITION beginning in late March. More will be discussed at the March 15 department meeting. See the information below about celebrating International Day of Mathematics 2023.
ATTENTION!!! Do you have any broken or unused calculators in your closets? Maybe they are in the back of one of your closets from a teacher who previously occupied the room. Maybe you just don't want to throw away the broken calculators. What ever the reason - please call Ms. Landis at extension 2267 so she can arrange to pick them up for refurbishing.
REMINDERS & IMPORTANT NOTES
MARCH 14 -16 - NJGPA (11th grade only)
WED., MARCH 15 - MARCH DEPARTMENT MEETING Please bring your book!
APRIL 7-14 - SPRING BREAK
WED., APRIL 19 - APRIL DEPARTMENT MEETING Please bring your book!
TUE., APRIL 25 - SAT School Day (11th grade only)
MATHEMATICS FOR EVERYONE
Celebrating IDM in 2023 presents a bit of a challenge as the NJGPA assessment will be administered to the 11th grade students on March 14-16. Because of the limited available time during the season of testing, ECST will celebrate IDM on Wednesday, March 29th. This will also be the day the we will begin the ECST math competition, MATH MADNESS. We will be using the Arete Labs platform which will simplify the time and location constraints. I will be meeting with Mr. Bevilacqua, Ms. Antoine, and Mrs. Lopez-Cassano to discuss the logistics of getting started. Information will be disseminated at the March 15th department meeting.
Some of the TI Rovers are in the buildings now. I will continue passing them out this week. These are the math team members who will be providing "garage space" and support for the TI Rovers in your buildings:
WCT: Arenstein & Tanion
NT: Lucas & Tewelde
PT: Shin, Zimmerman, Vodrazka, & Lopez-Cassano
Getting Started on TI Innovator Rover
Questions to reflect upon before we discuss chapters 10-12 at the March 15th department meeting:
Ch10: What is the primary goal for consolidating a task, activity, or lesson in your classroom?
Ch10: Does the way you currently consolidate a task, activity, or lesson encourage or inhibit thinking?
Ch11: For the students who write notes, why do they do it? Who do the students think the notes are for?
Ch11: Does the way you currently have your students take notes encourage or inhibit thinking?
Ch12: If you teach more than one math course or one subject, how does the spectrum of what you evaluate differ between courses/subjects?
Ch12: Does the way you currently choose to evaluate encourage or inhibit thinking?
PROFESSIONAL/INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES WORTH SHARING
Yes, we will be celebrating International Day of Mathematics at a later date due to the NJGPA testing which occurs from March 14-16. In the meantime, if your students are not testing on these days, you may want to take advantage of some of these activities.
We have purchased the subscription! Stay tuned for more information on creating an account.
Document links
New! Slideshows with real-time scoring
//www.problem-attic.com/realtime
New! Scramble multiple-choice answers on PDFs
//www.problem-attic.com/pdf-scrambling
Support for interactive question types
//www.problem-attic.com/interactive-questions
Splitting and merging documents with My Database
//www.problem-attic.com/mydatabase
Shortcuts - Navigation Panel & Random Selection
//www.problem-attic.com/shortcuts1
More information about key features
With the new year came an important milestone for Problem-Attic: it now has upwards of 350,000 questions! In this email we’ll highlight the new content, starting with titles which were already on the main Select page.
State Assessments. All questions released through summer 2022 should now be in the database. (If we missed something, please let us know.) This includes about 1000 new questions each from CO, MD and NC, and another 3000 from AZ, MA, ME, MS, RI, and PA and TX.
NY Regents and NYS 3–8. The database has all exams through last August, including Spanish translations for Algebra 1, Living Environment, and Earth Science. 450 new Spanish Competency questions are there, too. (Look in World Languages.)
NC Math Contests. For NC State, WCU and UNCC, we added about five years’ of questions, or 1500 total. We’re now caught up with all tests (pre-COVID), and a topical sort will follow soon.
On the main Select page in Problem-Attic, you’ll also see these new titles:
Illustrative Mathematics. We created a separate link in the top-right panel because the database grew so large! We added more than 8000 questions for grades 3–5 and high school, both lessons and practice. (Middle school was already there.) This is an excellent curriculum—math teachers, please check it out.
UT Austin Science Olympiad (ATXSO). This is the start of a big move into SciOly! We’ve got two years covered so far, 2021 and 2022, with nearly 6300 questions for Divisions B and C. They’re organized by level and subject.
NASA Space Math. These questions, about 3000, are for teaching applications of math through space science. They’re organized by original source or “booklet”. (A big thank-you to the main author, Dr. Sten Odenwald!) Our plan is to re-organize all or most of the questions by topic or NextGen Science Standards. If you’re interested in working on such a project, you can get details here.
There’s a new feature in Problem-Attic which is connected to the growing database of questions. It’s called Public Frameworks. Briefly, it gives you a way to customize the database for a specific purpose. Currently, there are more than 20 frameworks available for you to install—and you can easily build your own. We’ll tell you more about this in a separate email. But you don’t have to wait. There’s already a re-alignment of questions to MA, TX and VA science standards, New Visions Math (NY), and two math textbooks. See this page to get started.
Everything described above is freely available when you sign up for Problem-Attic. For teachers at subscribing schools, we’ll quickly mention two updates: the Pre-Alg to Pre-Calc database has roughly doubled in size, to about 19,000 questions; and, on the panel called Additional Math and Science, you’ll see a new title, IM Paired Practice Questions. It has about 4700 original questions to go with the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. To learn more, click the info button on the panel.