Thursday, October 14, 2010

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:
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:
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:



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

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