Documents+and+Assignments

Step one for this project was sketching out an engaging unit on trigonometry, giving only a knowing glance at how I have taught it in the past while focusing on the connections that I know could be made. Thankfully I was able to do that with a colleague. Together we organized the unit into seven topics, all but the exception of one teaching some valuable information that applied to some portion of the project. Here are the essential questions we designed:

Unit Question: What are the graphical and algebraic properties and applications of trigonometric functions?

What are the characteristics of right triangles essential for trigonometry?

How are the missing sides of a right triangle found using the six trigonometric functions?

How is the Unit Circle used in the study of geometry?

How is radian measure for an angle used to solve problems?

What are the characteristics of the graphs of the six trig functions?

How are trigonometric equations solved?

How are trigonometric identities proven to be true?

Each of these questions was broken down into one or more lessons designed to address the original unit question.

Here is the course website that students use to access some of these documents and some other resources:

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Below is the performance assessment that is the core of my unit. My colleague was excited about this idea, so she created a couple of problems to add to it. In addition, I came up with one more problem, so this version is altered slightly from what I submitted for our course. Also, it contains a rubric, but I am still working on having the students create the rubric in conjunction with me. If you don't want to sort through everything else, this is the heart of my unit.



Students have made the very first steps in constructing their wikispace. Although not much is done, you can view it here and check back if you want to watch it grow:

http://atcslc.wikispaces.com/

The initial right triangle trigonometry exploration:



You won't be able to open the GSP file without Geometer's Sketchpad.

Other relevant documents:



Many of the notes and activities for this section were delivered via Promethean flip-charts. I have excluded these and some other documents that are opened with lesser-known proprietary software, but these documents could be supplied upon request.

Although admittedly I did not utilize all of these documents in the implementation of my capstone project, what follows are the assignments from this course that were designed with my capstone project in mind: