MCC Math and Tech Workshop

This week I'm at Maria Anderson's Math and Tech Workshop.  I'll try to update this post as we go through the week.  There's a large Explorers group and I'm in the Adventurer's group.

Monday Morning

Adventurers brainstormed the following for discussion.  So look for more on this this week.

• Wolfram Alpha
• Attention-Getters
• Textbooks: cost, open source
• Geogebra
• Vyew
• Student interaction
• Twitter/texting
• Math Ed Research on Tech

Resources:

• Textbook cost: article in NYT 
• Math Ed Tech Research: CITE Journal, which has different topic areas, including math.

Social Media:

• Use Facebook pages for students.  They like the page and get those updates rather than your updates.
• Go over privacy settings with your students.  They are often ignorant of the reality. Check your own.
• Linked In: limited use, like a modern rolodex.
• Twitter: internet equivalent of drinking from a firehose.
• Twitter is more collegial.  Follow people who have worthwhile info to you, get nearly instantaneous feedback, hashtags to organize.
• Twapper Keeper (love that) to archive tweets.
• Twitter is a completely public space.
• Math Blogs: a node on Maria's MindMap of Spicing Up Mathematics

Monday Afternoon

Finally got time to play with Scratch.  I'm wondering about it as an activity directly for students, for preservice teachers, or as an instructional design tool to make activities.  Here's my first - kind of like pidgin Logo.




Learn more about this project

The end of the afternoon is working on Mathematica. It has developed quite a bit in the 15 years since I've last used it!