Resource Round Up - October

Photo por pepetomo @ Flickr

Carnivals
Math and Multimedia Carnival 4 has been up for a bit.  Lots of good things, interesting entries and great 4 images.  I feel challenged, as it will be here next month.  (Quick, think of cool 5 stuff!)  I'm already getting some submissions, and I encourage you to submit your own items, of course, but also to share posts on blogs you follow that are good examples of the organizing idea.  What is the organizing idea?  Work that shows one or more of the following:

1. Connection between and among different mathematical concepts
2. Connections between math and real life; use of real-life contexts to explain mathematical concepts
3. Clear and intuitive explanation of topics not discussed intextbooks, hard to understand, or difficult to teach
4. Proofs of mathematical theorems in which the difficulty of the explanation is accessible to high school students
5. Intuitive explanation of higher math topics, in which the difficulty is accessible to high school students
6. Software introduction, review or tutorials
7. Integration of technology (Web 2.0, Teaching 2.0, Classroom 2.0), in teaching mathematics

Submit an article.

Math Teachers at Play is appearing tomorrow at Homeschool Bytes.  She did a really nice Adventure Edition.  With one of Denise's Alexandria Jones adventures, Mimi Yang's deduction without p's and q's, and Guillermo Bautista gets back to the root of probability in lotteries... check it out!

The puntifical Frank and Ernest, of course.

Inservice Links
I get the opportunity to work on occasion with the secondary math teachers in Allendale, which is a 1:1 school (laptop:student).  Mostly it's trying to support them as they integrate technology for their efficiency and student support.  I don't know as much about their tech as they do, mostly, and obviously they know their students better, too.  They do a great job at using the time together to mutually develop tech skills, share what they're doing and how, and fit in some rare 6-12 content discussions while they're at it.

Their requests ahead of time were about using Posterous and Examview.  On a trip to another local 1:1 school, someone had advocated Posterous, raising their curiosity.  Posterous' advantage over blogger and wordpress is the ability to update a blog through email.  An advantage for student projects or live blogging, but not really for a teacher's blog.  I found a few resources:

• One teacher's use of Posterous
• Posterous in education wiki
• The official Posterous blog

It turns out a couple of the teachers already use Weebly in a similar way to the other school's use of Posterous.  Weebly seems to have a few features specifically intended for teaching.

Examview is a program for generating assessments that allows you to create variant exams easily, and supports both review and test modes, as well as automatically gathering student data.  The resources I found:

• A neat Examview collection of samples aligned by NY content standards (close to ours)
• Examview support forums
• Examview sample question banks.  There's one for Michigan.  (Not math specific, but I'm assuming at least part of it is math.)

But the most effective use of the time was the teachers creating assessments and sharing tips and questions.  Beautiful to see learning like that in a tight community.

Other possibilities I shared for investigating:

• Teacher LED IWB resources (http://www.teacherled.com/all-interactive-whiteboard-resources/)
• Two wikis with IWB resources for K-8: SMART measurement and SMART geometry

• Blogs: Teach Science and Math with some good technology information;
  Dan Meyer, HS teacher with great curriculum resources, problems and ideas.  Shares everything.  Becoming famous quickly - partly because of his TEDx talk;
  Kate Nowak - amazingly honest teacher.  Great math teaching ideas.
  Maria Anderson - Muskegon CC teacher and amazing tech for math leader.  For example, check out her interactive mindmap on playing in math.  (LOTS of resources.)

• Consider using Twitter.  I know it might sound dumb, but it has connected me with almost too many great resources and ideas.
  Decent list of math teacher twitterers to check out.
  Angela Maier's guide to Twitter use.

• Math teacher wiki.  Rapidly growing resource of lessons, games, and ideas.  Check out the virtual filing cabinets if nothing else.
• My week at math/tech camp this summer

• Are you looking for computer math games?  Try Waker, Entanglement or a whole suite of them at Manga High.  (Last actually has some real curriculum potential.  Offers tracking data, easy class enrollment and lots of offered help.)

• If we don't get a chance to watch it in session: Sugata Misra's TED talk on students self-learning with computers.

If you know of any Examview resources, tips or tricks, I would love to hear about it by email, tweet or comment.