Award Winning Publisher's Software

I viewed some of the award winning math software over the weekend. I thought that they were all very thorough and looked looked as though they would be useful in the classroom. I particualrly liked the the Fast Math on the Tom Snyder Productions website. It utilized a method of analyzing each student's skill level that allows not only the teacher to keep track of their progress but the student as well. I think that knowing that they are making progress is important to motivate the student to keep trying. Often, especially in math, students tend to get discouraged when the feel that they don't think that they are making progress. This software attempts to solve this problem and I think it does a fairly good job. It is extremely personalized to each student and even offers printouts to use in class as well as the computer software. I think that it is good to incorporate traditional teaching methods along side with the computer software in order to maximize learning

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly... of Second Life

Second Life is a virtual reality software that allows you to have a second life. Second Life is along the lines of The Sims but is a little more sophisticated. Second Life allows the user to be creative. You can create a version of yourself and change their appearance to anything you like. Also, you can build things and create new inventions. Another feature of Second Life is that there are real business and universities on Second Life. IBM and Dell have virtual business environments that can train employees long distance or can introduce a three-dimensional rendering of a new product. There are also some universities, such as Notre Dame, that use Second Life. These universities can use Second Life as a way to have virtual classroom and as a cost effective solution to distance learning. In Second Life, as in the real world, the user can get a job or open any kind of store they want.

The Good:
Second Life fosters creativity and challenges the user to take their imagination to the next level. Second Life also provides an outlet for communication between peers. Also, the universities classrooms allow for students to learn from practically anywhere in the world. The business aspect of Second life can also teach the user proper money management.

The Bad:
One bad aspect of Second Life is that it takes away the personal feeling of a classroom. Also, Second Life users can have a non-educational motive to play Second Life, which is fine but encounters with such players must be approached appropriately. Also, in regards to the corporations on Second Life, there can be a feeling of a lack in legitimacy.

The Ugly:
Although the fact that Second Life is available to can be useful there is still the chance that some people that use Second Life might have other motives. When encountering people the user must take things with a grain of salt and try to make sure the people they are interacting with are the people they are interacting with. There is no really way to monitor students appropriate use.

So, although Second Life can be used as an educational tool with a business application educators must closely monitor their students to be sure that they are using this software appropriately.

Google Earth

Google has come up with fantastic tools that have reinvented the way we do things. Google Earth is a yet another one of these tools. Google Earth is a program that uses virtual reality and applies is to the world, and in fact, the Moon and Mars. Google Earth allows you to go anywhere in the world with a click of a button. For instance, you could be looking at the layout of New York City and then move the screen to show you the layout of Beijing. Not only does Google Earth show you real overhead shots but also includes some 3-D buildings. So if you wanted to see how the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids looked you could find them and rotate your views to see every angle. Another feature that Google Earth has is that you can find restaurants and lodging if you are planning out a trip. Other than recreational uses Google Earth also has educational uses. Online there are “trips” that can be viewed in Google Earth that follow the treks of famous people or literary works. For example, you could follow the path of Lewis and Clark or follow the path of Huck Finn. The great feature with these trails is that along the way you can click on the points and get more information about the area and the place. Along with the trips that can be found online, you can also create them yourself.

Google Earth can also be used in a math classroom. Students can use Google Earth map out flight patterns for trips and use properties of triangles to calculate how far it is do fly directly as opposed to stopping in different cities. For instance, say you were traveling from Pittsburgh, PA to El Paso, TX but on the way you changed planes in Indianapolis, IN. The student could use Google Earth to find the distance from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis and from Indianapolis to El Paso. The students could then find the angle the two different flight paths make and use trigonometric functions to find the distance if it was a straight shot and compare that to the actual distance between Pittsburgh and El Paso.

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DyKnow .. DyYES

Have you ever felt frustrated when a professor or teacher has moved on to the next slide before you can write down the first one? I know I have. It is a situation that doesn’t lend to good grades either and can become very frustrating. Well, don’t fret there is a program out there that helps to solve the problem. DyKnow is software that helps ease the process of note taking. It allows the professor to start a session that the students join. In the session there is a panel that shows the professors notes or slideshow and the students can take notes right on that. It eases the frustration of missing something on a slide and instead being able to actually take notes on it. DyKnow allows you to save the slide from the session for later use.

DyKnow has some other handy features for teachers. There is a button that students to click that lets the teacher know whether or not the student understands the information that is being covered. This is a good tool because often times students say they understand it but in all actuality they don’t. With this tool teachers can see who doesn’t get it and what they don’t understand so they can go back and elaborate on the topic. Also, there is a feature that allows the teacher to see what the student is doing on their computer instead of taking notes. It allows the teacher to see who isn’t paying attention and to get them reengaged in the lesson. Another feature that is useful for the teacher is that they can have the students answer something by writing or typing on the pane and then those slides can be collected and returned with a check or a comment. This is a good way to incorporate participation into the class and is great for the students who are a little shy.

DyKnow would be good in the math classroom. One use for DyKnow would be to have a problem that the students have to work out and then their work can be collected for credit or to see where they went wrong in their thinking. Another use would be to check for understanding using the feature I talked about previous. It is very likely that in a math class there are students who just don’t understand what is going on and this feature can let you know where they got lost and things stopped making sense. The sooner we catch the error the easier it is going to be to correct it and continue on learning.

Overall, DyKnow is an excellent product for any classroom and offers many features to enhance the learning of the student while lessening frustration.

Podcasts

Some might wonder what exactly is a podcast? Well, a podcast is an audible information file. These digital media files can be audio or visual. Podcasts are usually a series that are releases episodically. These podcasts are usually broadcasted over an RSS feed. The modes of delivery also vary. Podcasts can be delivered using the Internet, streamed webcasts and podcatchers. Podcatchers are user programs like iTunes, Zune, Juice and Winamp. The podcasts can be downloaded and then they can be viewed on the computer or they can be transferred onto a digital audio device like a Zune or iPod.

Some podcasts that we thought were good in regards to math are:

Math Factor -- Math Factor is a podcast that is a site that is run through the University of Arkansas. This site is a site both for podcasts and blogs. The contributing authors range in profession from radio journalist to a mathematics professor. The different contributing authors post a podcast or a blog that are on a variety of topics. Math Factor is a collection of different math problems and classics math brain teasers. They are in a bunch of different topics such as logic, calculus, and infinity along with other topics.
This site could be used to show students a different side of mathematics. The one thing that I think the website could do better would be to make navigating to podcasts a little easier.

Sudoku (mathgrad.com)

I found it interesting to think about how much math really is involved in a Sudoku. The author of the podcast addresses the misleading idea that some people have about how Sudoku has nothing to do with math besides the fact that it involves numbers. In reality the way to find the number of possible Sudokus was only discovered a few years ago. And even today, real people are better at solving Sudokus than computers are.
I thought that this podcast was going to be a very confusing description of how to solve a Sudoku, but instead it gave a plethora of interesting background information about its history (surprisingly not of Asian origins) and relations to other mathematical areas. It was more like a radio show than a tutorial, which could be useful for getting the attention of students and getting them interested in math, or, in the case of other podcasts, other subjects as well.

Math Mutation -- Math Mutation is a website that has multiple podcasts on the math that you probably didn't see in high school. These podcasts are for all ages and range from "Fractals in a Hat" to "Homer's Lsst Theorem". Most of the podcasts are fun and interesting brain teasers. These podcasts help to get people excited about math and to expose them to math they weren't sure existed.
One thing about this website that could be improved is the fact that there is now organized system for how the podcasts are listed. The podcasts are just listed in order on one page with a really long scroll bar that feels like it goes on forever. Other than that, this site seems like a good way to get people involved with math.

One use we thought a podcast has could be that it is used to walk students through problems. Often students are attempting to do their homework and they get stuck and after time spent in frustration they give up. One way to reduce the frustration is to have similar, or even the exact, problems being worked out in a podcast. This gives the students a refresher on how exactly things were done in class. Also, it allows the students to see how the concepts in class were applied to different situations.

Another idea that we had was to have the students podcast for themselves. Students could post a question when they have trouble and then other students could respond. Students could create a podcast with the answer to the question and walk the other student through the problem or the concept. This allows learning from both ends of the process. The viewer of the podcast learns specifics of the application and the creator of the podcast tests and solidifies their knowledge by helping others.

One last idea that a podcast can be used for is to keep parents and guardians updated. The teacher can put out a podcast every week laying out the overview of the week of learning. The teacher could also talk about what the homework was for that day or even the week so the parents know what homework their students have.

Educational Issues: Wikis and Education

Online wikis, such as Wikipedia, ahve grown in popularity. The provide ease of access to a variety of subjects and are becoming better every day. However, many teachers doubt their credibility due to the fact that anyone can edit articles, often anonymously. Wiki sites are working to improve their credibility by requiring editors to use thier real names, even though anyone will still be able to edit the articles. I do not believe that students should be able to cite wiki sites as credible sources because the author of any type of liturature i bound to have some bias no matter how scholarly they are. When the identity of the author id removed frome the euqation i becomes almost impossible to understand their purpose for writing what they did, and so a great portion of the value of the entry is lost. However, I do believe that students should definitely use wiki sites as a way of gather ing imformation, just not for thier cited information. at the bottom of most Wikipedia articles there are several works cited. The reader is often given a large list of credible sources that they can use that will provide the same information in most cases, since Wikipedia has a lot of artilces that were jsut copied and pasted from the sources that are cited. It is a very helpful to have a list of avaliable sources that have the specific information that the student is looking for. So while the actual information included in the artilces may not be creadible and is therefore unsuitalbe for citation, wiki sites can still be used as useful research tools.

Violence in Schools Today

In the Education Issues section, for Chapter 1 in our text, one of the topics was school violence. They talked about how violence in schools is the number one concern amongst both teachers and parents. It is also a heated political topic. There is much debate over whether schools should increase their security by installing metal detectors and increasing security presence, or for the school and community to looking into the factors in the community that are causing school violence. Right now the solution that is being used is the to beef up security and install metal detectors.
I went to an inner city school so I am very used to this solution. I believe that for the time being, to try and keep the schools as safe as possible, this currently solution is the way to go. In the future, I do believe that we should work on addressing the issues in the community that cause these violence issues. However, I see it as a high priority to keep our students safe and in the immediate future if the way to do that is to install metal detectors and increase security then i think that for the time being that should be the solution. I also believe that the concern and work should not stop there but continue into the community.

Virtual Manipulatives

Our text, Teachers Discovering Computers: Integrating Technology and Digital Media in the Classroom, by: Shelly, has a companion site. Within this site, for all of the chapters, there is a integration corner. Under the Chapter 1 Integration Corner for Math I found a entry entitled National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. In this site there are tools for all grade levels and subjects. I clicked on the 9-12 grade Geometry section and found a plethora of virtual manipulatives from Tangrams to Geoboards. There is even a turtle geometry game were you have to move the turtle through a maze.

When you decide which manipulative you want to use all you have to do is click on the title and it opens up in another window. In the new window, there are some given activites that include the manipulative. This would be a good way to integrate technology into a classroom and it would allow the students to interact with the math. These manipulative will also allow students to make the concepts concrete in their minds.


An example of the tangrams activities window.

Microsoft Equation Editor

Have you ever had trouble writing an equation on a word document or on the computer in general? If you do end up getting the equation in there does it look like something that an abstract artist would paint? Do you get so frustrated that you just give up and write the equation in by hand or even scrap the whole idea? Microsoft has come with a program to end all of our misery, Microsoft Equation Editior.

MS Equation Editor allows you to create a variety of equations that are appear the way that it should be written. It can be found in MS Word 2007 right on the ribbon. Under the Insert tab there is an equation button on the right under the symbols section.

If you click on the Equation button you get the Equation tools that will help you edit or create your equation.

This window gives you the ability to creator your own equation and provides you with any math symbols you might need. There are fractions, subscripts, infinity symbols, and even the three dot triangle that represents therefore.

Another tool that is avaible from MS Equation Editor are the built in equations. That include some common equations like the area of a circle and even some slightly advanced equations like the Binomial Theorem. These pre-made equations are good to use when you are doing a certain section in a math class on one of these equations. In that lesson it is probable that the eqaution will come up multiple different times with different values and it makes things a lot easier when the general format of the equation is already then you can simply put values in the equation or have the equation for the students to see it.

Another application for the class would be to have the students make up their own equations for a game that the whole class will play. To ensure that the equations are easy to read and understand the students can use equation editor to create their equations. This allows the students an oppurtunity to build up their technology base but also to have them interact with the math instead of just doing what the teacher does.

Overall, MS Equation Editor is a great tool to have in the math classroom. It allows the ease of worksheets and the professionalism of equations.

Survivor Math

A game template we got froom the network folder

Pointing in a New Direction: Microsoft Power Point

Microsoft Power Point is making it easier than ever to create multi-media presentations for more effective use in classrooms and workplaces. With a few clicks and a little creativity, you can have yourself a stunning presentation chalked full of pictures, animations, sound effects and even video, all from this one program.

There are several different templates to create an organised look, but if those aren't enough, there are still more online. These are great for those of us that are slightly less artistically gifted because they take care of all the colors and designs to make the presentation easy to read. There are also plenty of ways to animate bullet points to glide onto the screen, captivating the audience in the process. The animation of different objects on each screen can be very useful for teachers who wish to take their students through material step by step. They can show as much as they want to at one time and then add more as they go along. This quality would be extremely useful in the mathematics classroom as it would allow the teacher to walk the students through each problem and not have to worry about making mistakes copying down the problems from one step to the next.

With the 2007 version of Power Point the presenter cannot only use the inking tool in the presentation of the power point, but may also keep any inking that is made during the creation of the power point and have that in the presentation as well. This again would be handy in the mathematics classroom because it would allow the teacher to make very neat drawings of things, like graphs, ahead of time and not to have to take up class time to draw a less accurate version of it. At the same time, if the teacher did wish to draw during class, that option is still available.

There is also a way to include links to outside sources that can be accessed during the presentation. This is useful for incorporating things such as videos or other articles that would be too large to include in the actual power point.

Power Point has many good things to offer, however, when many people use it they tend to get lazy and read directly from the screen. This basically ruins everything that the snazzy applications of Power Point have been used to create. Power Point is a very useful tool, for teachers and students, but only if used correctly.

To Google or Not to Google... Docs

We all know that Google is one of the commonly used search engines. We even know that they offer us free email. However, what some might be unfamiliar with Google Docs.

Google Docs is a tool that some might think is pointless if you have Microsoft Office. Google Docs is a service you get free with a gmail account. You can create a document, a presentation, a spreadsheet and even a form. The cool thing about Google Docs is that you can choose to share your documents with whom ever you want. This can save a lot of email storage space and a lot of confusion while group editing. This is a good feature to have to make sure that the best copy of you document.

Google Docs can also be beneficial for the classroom. A teacher can post a document and share it with the class and they would be able to have access to that document and maybe even edit it. In a math classroom a teacher could use a form template to create a small concepts diagnostic test. Also, if the teacher used something from the internet or used a slideshow to illustrate a concept they could share it on Google Docs with the whole class to refer back to. Also, a teacher could put up calculator steps and tips so that the students would be able to use their technology effectively.

So not only is Google good for searches and finding information it is also good for creating and sharing knowledge through Google Docs.

Intro to the Amazing Math People

Sarah Dolby, Claire Grabowski, and Aaron Berkly make up this amazing group.