## Wednesday, January 18, 2012

### Some handy programs for your TI calculator

 These programs might come in handy, and they are all based on the same 3 programming steps: Get the calculator to prompt you for some variable(s), (PROMPT) Tell the calculator what calculations to do to those variable(s), and where to store the result, (STORE) Tell the calculator to tell you the result. (DISPLAY) Here are my programs for distance between 2 points, solutions to a quadratic equation, and distance between a point and a line: Distance between points (A, B) and (C, D)
 Solutions to quadratic equation ax² + bx + c = 0
 Distance between line Ax + By + C = 0 and point (M, N) If you have written any programs, don't hesitate to share them on your blog!

## Tuesday, January 17, 2012

### Blogging guidelines

For each unit that we study, each of you will post at least 5 times on your own blogs, and each of you will comment at least 5 times on someone else's blog.
• Posting:
• Size of post: About a paragraph, in your own words of course, but make it interesting to read, ie. put in some pictures, or subtitles, or whatever you think is cool and eye-catching. Write something that YOU would want to read!
• Content of post: A few suggestions/rules:
• At least one of your posts should be a summary of a lesson for the current week. Any math notation or symbols, you must use a tool, for example, like this, to get it to appear properly in your post, none of this "x^2" nonsense! This post should also include a sample question on the lesson topic, eg something you might expect to see on a test.
• You can post about your independent assignment, telling us about your topic, or the tool you plan to use to present it, or any interesting finds as you do your research.
• You can post about activities we did during that unit, for example, this week we will be doing a geogebra activity for the log function. What questions did you try to answer, what did you find, what are you still wondering about....etc
• You can post about any math-related topic at all, something in the news that seems math-y, a cool math website that you found and want to share, reflections on a post that you read that inspired you.
• Commenting:
• Size of comment: Two or three sentences.
• Content of comment: Up to you, but "Nice post!" or "Wow! Cool!" won't count. Make it clear that you have actually read the post by referring to parts of it, adding to the information it contained, answering or asking a question....etc. The thing is, if you are actually interested in the person's post, you will know what to say!

### Pictures from Costa Rica

 Katerina went to Costa Rica over the break, and here are her wonderful pictures! Baby monkey
 Beach
 Flower gardens
 Kat's Costa Rica
 Mokey!

## Monday, January 16, 2012

### Solving exponential equations using change of base property

Here is my suggestion for doing equations like the last one we did in Sci Math gr 11 today, and by the way, I used codecogs to do all this so it looks super pretty:

$\large \bg_white 6^{x+1}=3^{x-2}$

$\large \bg_white log6^{x+1}=log3^{x-2}$                                         (take log of both sides)

$\large \bg_white (x+1)log6=(x-2)log3$                       (use third property of logs)

$\large \bg_white (x+1)(0.778)=(x-2)(0.477)$          (replace logs with their app values)

$\large \bg_white 0.778x+0.778=0.477x-0.954$      (distribute)

$\large \bg_white 0.778x-0.477x=-0.778-0.954$  (get like terms together)

$\large \bg_white 0.301x=-1.732$                                           (combine like terms)

$\large \bg_white x=\frac{-1.732}{0.301}=-5.754$                              (et voila!)

## Wednesday, January 11, 2012

### More about math in nature!

As a followup to that video we watched just before the break, you might be interested to watch this. It helped me understand a BIT more about some of the geometry we saw in the spiral, and the dragonfly's wings:

### The Classblog begins!

As you blog about math, you will also be learning how to do all kinds of other things, for example, getting math notation and symbols to appear in a blog post:

$\sqrt{a^2+b^2}=c$

Embedding a picture:

Or embedding anything for that matter!

Oh the thinks you will think!

## Monday, January 9, 2012

### Welcome to Mrs McG's classblogs!

This year, my students will be blogging about math. This is the site from which all of their blogs can be found.  Each student's blog is, or will soon be, easy to access from here.