This week’s subject area is Mathematics. Meaning lots of data gathering and presenting. This also relates to our ‘ improving your blog’ activity about using categories and tags.
Improving your blog
How easy is it for people to find posts they want to read on your blog? If a visitor is interested in book reviews and you have written some, how will they find them easily?
Answer: They will look at your post categories and/or your tag cloud.
Here is a link to a post written by Sue Waters from Edublogs explaining more about categories and tags and how to use them with your posts. If using blogspot, you have labels like Em has on her blog. In Weebly, they interchange tag and category but they suggest no more than twenty tags.
Categories are like the chapter headings in books while tags are like the index words at the back of a book.
These relate to the posts you write about. These categories appear in the header area or at the footer section of each post you write. My post categories for this blog are on the left sidebar and named ‘Challenge Sections.’ My tags are in the right sidebar and named ‘Find posts about.’
What are your posts mainly about?
- Check out the categories and/or tags these students are using: Daniel (left), Teegan(right), Isabella, Harry, Sabastian
- Classes check out Miss T’s categories at bottom of left sidebar – notice it is a dropdown box and she has included names of students in case they write a post on the class blog.
- Miss W has a moving box for her categories on the right sidebar – need to be a pro blog to use this.
Go back through the posts you have already written and put them in one of your categories. Get into the habit of ticking the category and adding the tags before you publish your post.
Why are categories and tags important when writing your posts?
Where else do you find tags used in technology?
Write a post about the importance of tags and categories
- Why should regular users of the internet be using tags and categories whenever they leave a footprint on the web?
- Where are users asked to use tags?
- What is geotagging?
- Why did you decide on those categories for your blog?
Ideas for posts related to mathematics
- Add a poll or survey on your blog – make sure you include a link in the post so I can visit and promote it in a ‘Visit these’ post. Check the webtools links on the sidebar for suggested websites to use.
- Join Free Rice and then find the group Student Blogging Challenge and join that. Can we raise 1 million grains of rice by the end of the challenges? So far we have over 80000 with Ethan having raised 10000+ on his own. Lots of large numbers when talking about this website.
- Maybe you could run something like the Oreo cookie challenge in your school and post the results on your class blog.
- Use diagramly or Google sketchup or something similar to create your idea of a dream school. Add your image to your blog. You might want to include some measurements.
- Visit this website suggested by Ronnie Burt, check out the examples of math art. What could you create and then add to your blog?
- Take part in the student blogging challenge milk chocolate M&Ms data gathering. I saw this run by Mrs Smith but she used Smarties which we have in Australia. As most countries in the world now have M&Ms, I would like you to buy a 50 gram packet of milk chocolate M&Ms and count the number of M&Ms in the box. Sort them by colour and add your data to the form at this link. Try not to add in one packet at a time, but multiple packets to save space on the spreadsheet. At the end of November I will publish the results but here is a link so your class can see the spreadsheet.
- If doing the M&M data gathering as a class, use your M&Ms to create a pattern before eating them. Take a photo of your pattern and add to your blog with a post about what you did.
- Have you used the programming website called ‘Scratch‘? If you have you might be able to give us a link to the scratch game you created.
- Use a digital camera or camera phone or iPad and take photos of maths terms you can find outside. Think about angles, shapes, geometry, numbers, statistics, probability, patterns. Now create a slideshow and put on your blog for others to guess which maths words you have photographed.
- Your class could look at this International weather investigation This includes a skype lesson on climate change You might like to take part.
- I saw a post on a class blog about the Global children’s challenge website. Are you taking part?
- Write a post about a project relating to maths that your class has taken part in.
- Find out about geocaching in your area. Could you create something similar in your school grounds?
- What do these words have to do with maths? – Fibonacci sequence, fractals, wolfram alpha, networks Find some other words using this maths dictionary. Write a post about your words.
- Add a widget to your blog relating to maths
- Write a post estimating how many days, weeks or months until you have 100 posts or 100 visitors or even larger numbers. Let’s find out how accurate your estimation is.
Still got time left this week
Visit other blogs to leave interesting comments.
If you know of any other great maths websitesm leave a link in a comment on this post, so we can include them next week.
Make sure your blog is registered ready for Blog Action Day next week. The theme is ‘The Power of We’ which fits in well with maths and groups of people.
Whatever you do make sure you include a link back to this post.
Image: ‘Geometric M&Ms‘
PDF 
I am a middle school teacher who retired in 2012 but still loves teaching. In my spare time I enjoy tracing my family history and helping others with their genealogy as well as chatting with my friends around the world. But most of all, I enjoy travelling and visiting new places.
I made a math tutorials page last year. http://mjgds.org/students/briannag/math/
ABCya is a good math site for kids.
Thank you to others for suggesting good Mathematics websites. I have some links on my blogroll to good websites. Scroll down to find the heading ‘Maths Sites’. I hope you find them helpful.
http://mnorton.global2.vic.edu.au/
Hi Miss W,
I did a post on maths, although it isn’t really one that you suggested. Is that okay? Here is the link: http://dawsosblog.edublogs.org/2012/10/10/maths/
Thank You,
Dawso
Hi Miss W
Thanks for sharing my Smarties data. I wish I was on class at the moment so that we could count M&M’s for you. There are some other great suggestions in our comments from that post about maths with Smarties that would be great to do with M&M’s but I had not thought of creating a pattern. It was very interesting to compare the mass of each bag or box to see how close to 50 grams they were. I was trying to come up with another data collecting exercise for my class for this year but so far have not. Does anyone else have some suggestions?
Mrs S
Great post!
Below is a link to my Maths label that is on my blog, it has all of the Maths post that I have put up through out the year.
http://pridefelicity.blogspot.co.nz/search/label/Maths
Gotta love mathematics! Great blog also, keep it up
– Johnny miniskate
Hi I would just like some help on this one I have done all the instructions but it just doesnt seem to like me so could I please have some help
thanks max http://maxw.global2.vic.edu.au/
Hi
I would just like some help on this one. I did all the instructions, but it did not seem to like me. The tag cloud is not appearing on my sidebar.
http://maxw.global2.vic.edu.au/
G’day Max,
The reason the tag cloud is not appearing is because you haven’t tagged any of your posts yet. Both of your posts are categorized as Uncategorized as well. Your categories might include Sport then you can tag your FIFA post as soccer and FIFA.