Mathematics

Did you ever want to show the students the mistakes that keep occurring within their writing as a class? Do you want to show them the variety of words, or lack of, that are a part of their writing? There is an easy and very visual way to do this called Word Clouds. You can enter an entire class of papers by copying and pasting using digital copies of student papers before they turn in their finals.      www.wordle.net

Once you have entered the papers, the words that are not common like "the" or "it" can be removed and the rest of the vocabulary used by a class put together. The bigger the word, the more often it was used. Above is a demonstration of a paper that was entered into Wordle and you can see the correlation to how often a word is used. The same will show up with common mistakes in spelling.

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We all know how much music means to our lives and the lives of our students. They are constantly listening to what draws them and interests their ears. The twelve-tone matrix for composing music was developed with the logical minds of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, who were all Viennese composers. Finale's Notepad allows the students to enter the notes from their matrix-generated composition into a free music sequencer program. Therefore this would be a great cross-curriculum project with Music that would allow the students to see the application of Math in all of its greatness!

There are so many sites that explain what the twelve-tone matrix is and how it relates to Mathematics, all you need to do is put it into a google search. There are also many different sites that will help with creating a matrix so that students are able to put it into the Finale NotePad to create music. Below are some examples:

http://unitus.org/FULL/12tone.pdf

http://composertools.com/Tools/matrix/MatrixCalc.html




Have fun and see where this can take your students and their creativity with the application of Mathematics.

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Do you want to discuss the fractal and chaos theory with your students? Again music with the application of Mathematics will allow for a visual and aural illustration that might fascinate your students. I cannot explain these concepts myself, but this would be an interesting site for those teachers who are interested in creating something different with their students.

This animated GIF attractor is from Sprott's Fractal Gallery. This is only one of many different examples that Julien C. Sprott has on his webpage.