blog reboot and getting outside

I'm trying a reboot of my blog. My goal is to keep posts short, update what is going on with what I'm doing as a teacher and to make up for the years of blog posts that I spewed disgusting technology and data focused ideas...

This year I've made it a goal to get students out of the classroom on a weekly basis to see the math that we are learning appearing in the world around us. 

We walked the perimeter of the school grounds which I learned (after being here for 14 school years) is actually about a mile. Our shoes got wet but we now have a good memory to connect with perimeter!

We went into the cafeteria to find the area and that looked like counting floor tiles and subtracting areas of the room that had closets or protruding sections of wall. 

We went outside to look for right triangles and determine if objects being measured represented right angles.

I'm finding the students are enjoying getting out to be active and the more often we do this I'm able to see the students' creativity in finding ideas present I wouldn't have thought of. 

Exercise Log

Since my journey into Google Apps use I've begun using it in my daily life. In the summer I ramp up the exercise from what I'm able to do--a combination of being a teacher and living in cold-wintered Minnesota I suppose. 

I've created a Google Form template that I can enter in workout information to track my progress and total miles, pace and running excuses. There are other templates already out there you can also search in the Template Gallery. 

With my template, I like to switch between biking and running and wanted the results to be separated out by exercise type. I also gave myself a place for an excuse each day and have those phrases placed into a word cloud in the "widgets" tab just for fun. For example, on the day of my 8 mile run I had a burger and root beer an hour before and noted that in the form.

I plan to bookmark the form as a web app on my iPod and just enter the data that way. I won't have to go into the actual spreadsheet unless I want to track my progress. Data is sorted into a totals table, a pace chart, which is based on the total pace and how it is hopefully improving... If you are only tracking one mode of exercise the pacing chart will probably make more sense.

I've shared it in the template gallery if you are interested in trying it out. (Click here)