Background Resources for Teachers
Ratios, whether simple comparisons or rates or percents or scale factors, are
old friends of the middle school teacher. Every year you deal with them in your
classroom. However, you may like to explore a particular topic, such as the
golden mean or indirect measurement. These online workshop sessions, created
for teachers, make use of applets and video to enable deeper investigation of a
topic. You may find yourself fascinated enough with a topic to import the
workshop idea directly into your classroom.
How do ratios relate to our usual idea of fractions? In this session, part of a
free online course for K-8 teachers, you can look at ways to interpret, model
and work with rational numbers and to explore the basics of proportional
reasoning. You can investigate these ideas through interactive applets, problem
sets, and a video of teachers solving one of the problems. This session is part
of the online course
Learning Math: Number and Operations.
In this set of lessons created for K-8 teachers, you can examine graphical and
geometric representations of these topics, as well as some of their
applications in the physical world. A review of percents in terms of ratio and
proportion is followed by an investigation of Fibonacci numbers and the golden
mean. Why do we study the golden rectangle? In a video segment, an architect
explains the place of the golden rectangle as an architectural element
throughout history. This set of lessons is from
Learning Math: Number and Operations.
Explore scale drawing, similar triangles, and trigonometry in terms of ratios
and proportion in this series of lessons developed for teachers. Besides
explanations and real-world problems, the unit includes video segments that
show teachers investigating problems of similarity. To understand the ratios
that underlie trigonometry, you can use an interactive activity provided
online. This session is part of the course
Learning Math: Geometry.
For practical experience in the use of trigonometry, look at these examples of
measuring impossible distances and inaccessible heights. These lessons show
proportional reasoning in action! This unit is part of the online course
Learning Math: Measurement.
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Copyright
June 2006 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the National Science Foundation.
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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
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