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?

There are most likely many of us that would like to use imovie in our classrooms, but for various reasons, can’t. (I live Brazil, and mac support does not exist where I am. You buy and use a mac at your own risk. Everything goes to the coast to repair, and meanwhile weeks pass…)

For us, MS-moviemaker is a workable substitute. For tutorials and other helps:

atomiclearning.com mightycoach.com

wtvi.com gslis.utexas.edu

forum papajohn.org

The latest version of moviemaker can be downloaded here.

Digging through my bookmarks, I found this link (thanks to SEGA TECH) for TiddlyWiki, best described as a wiki for your thumbdrive. As it is located on your thumbdrive, its really not a collaborative tool.
BUT

Tiddlyspot will now host your tiddlywiki, making it more of a collaborative tool. As a new administrator I have policies, student rolls, schedules, and my lessons plans all “wikied.” (Is that a word?) The organization just feels better than the folder inside a folder inside a folder routine.

What can I do with this #2 was going to be about Scratch, the new toy/tool from LiFELONG KINDERGARETEN at the MIT Media Labs. But Kevin Sandridge at notesfromtheridge beat me to it. He has links to a few videos and other resources. The questions is still, what can I do with this?

Here is what the scratch homepage says:

“Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.”

edit: EwanMcIntosh gives some other links to using scratch as does teachinghacks.

So, because of Kevin, I’ll skip right to number three. BlockCad is a program I found mentioned here and there ( sorry that I lost the pages that showed it to me and can’t give the proper credit.)

Again to quote from the homepage:

“BlockCAD is a freeware program for building virtual models with Lego-like bricks.

You can save your models, or save pictures of them (.bmp, .jpg), even reuse a complete model as a part in another model.

Everything can be controlled with the mouse, but it’s also possible to use the keyboard for most of the commands, making ‘routine building’ more effective, and there is a minimum of text involved, to make it easier for kids.”

What can I do with this?

This book may be a little outdated by this time but Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson was my first introduction to using these tools in a classroom setting. I use them all the time for my own personal study, but it never dawned on me to use them in my classes. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to improve their lessons and relevance in today’s classrooms.

First time through I skimmed and high-lighted section titles. For my second time through I am using my computer to check out the links provided. Highly recommended.