Journal of the Mathematics Council of the Alberta Teachers’ Association
Volume 44 Issue 1, December 2006
Professional development continues to be an exciting endeavour in teaching mathematics. This is evident by the overwhelming number of teachers who participated in the annual conference of the Mathematics Council of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (MCATA) in October (photographs and report to follow in our next publication). I suspect that the next few years will bring many opportunities to expand our understanding of how math is learned and taught with the introduction of the new provincial curriculum. I encourage you to be involved in this process of curriculum revision (see Jennifer Dolecki’s report in this issue).
As always, it is important that teachers share their professional knowledge with the community. This issue contains articles that may help us think differently about our pedagogical approaches and the mathematics that we teach. The feature articles focus on unique ways of interacting with mathematical ideas from elementary to high school. The teaching ideas include several examples of lesson plans that have been taught and innovative approaches to integrating technology, factoring trinomials and reducing fractions. I welcome your reactions and responses to any of the ideas you encounter in these articles. I am thankful to these authors for their contributions. I hope their ideas provoke your thinking.
I wish to thank the reviewers who work diligently to provide feedback to our authors. It is their commitment to our profession that makes this publication possible. The work that the MCATA executive does to facilitate professional development is sometimes an invisible activity; their support in the process of publishing this journal is significant and much appreciated.
I wish you all the best as you return to school, renewed and inspired in anticipation of what 2007 will bring.
Gladys Sterenberg
1
2
Gladys Sterenberg
3
Janis Kristjansson
4
The Right Angle: Report from Alberta Education
Jennifer Dolecki
5 – 7
Noticing as a Form of Professional Development in Teaching Mathematics
Julie S Long
8 – 16
Jerome Proulx
17 – 22
A Geometrical Meaning for the Correlation Coefficient
Murray L Lauber
23 – 25
When Technology Integration Goes to Math Class
Brenda Dyck
26 – 27
Abbey Alexander
28 – 29
Factoring Trinomials: A Student’s Perspective
Duncan E McDougall and Pega Alerasool
30 – 31
Travelling to South Africa: An Application Task
Kim Runnalls
32 – 33
Reducing Fractions and Its Application to Rational Expressions
Duncan E McDougall
34
A Craig Loewen
35
