new tricks for an old dog

I’ve wanted for some time to create a notebook to hand out to my math students the first day of class. Its partly to give them an organized resource for the year, and partly to allow me to teach them a systematic way of doing things. (How many of your junior highers entering your math classes insist on doing their math work across the lined page instead of using unlined paper and working form top to bottom?)

Here’s what I have included this year. If you have any suggestions please let me know.

• Quick guide to wxMaxima (open source replacement for Mathematica.)
• An Excel tutorial
• Excel tutorial for matrices (for the Alg2 and above crowd.)
• Cheatsheet with the trig identities (again Alg2 and above.)
• rectangular and polar graphing paper

What else would you add?

BlockCad (which I wrote about here) has a partner named AnkerCad, a freeware program for building virtual models with bricks.

I think most of my students would prefer to use BlockCad (lego-based) over AnkerCad, but it does give you another option. (and its pretty cool.)

The question is still: What can I do with this?

Introducing a new feature here at new tricks for an old dog, the “what can I do with this.” Here I want to link to site or programs (freeware or opensource) that interest me, and ask the question: how can I use this in my classroom or as an extension for outside classroom assignments/activities.

The first site is Imagination Cubed from GE, and its a limited online collaboration drawingapplication.

The site lets you and up to two friends who you invite draw free-hand (like we all drew with MS-Paint back in the day) at the same time on the same project.You can change the background color, change pen styles and color, add a few simple stamps, and add text.

The completed project can be printed, emailed or replayed.

Here are a few screen shots:

So the question is, what can I do with this?

Games, faceboook/myspace (or as my dad calls it myface), IMing and maybe word processing. Thats typicially what my students use their computer/web for, and about the right order they would do them in. More important than what is on their list is what is missing–research, e-learning, online collaboration…

The question is how to impress on them the need to see the computer/web as a tool as well. One way might be to introduce them to the homepage tools that are beginning to pop up all over the web. All of them are customizable, flexible and offer many services. Imagine if when one of your students started their web browser instead of the default homepage they went to a web-based web that gave their assignments for the week, along with a to-do list for those assignments. Maybe even a quick summary of recent blog entries having to do with their biology research into regeneration. Along side of those would be a link to your blog where you have posted the extra credit problems of the week, along with the discussion question you want them to write a comment on. Included could be the top 5 videos on youtube or the latest whatever they are interested in. Maybe even the last 5 emails they have received.

Here are a few sites that can provide just that:

Stan Schroeder at franticindustries in a two part post reviews 20 webOS. The reviews can be found here and here. These are different than homepages/startpages but could be used in a like manner.

Remote  access has a post comparing pageflakes and igoogle here.