Sep
29
Computers in the Math Classroom
Filed Under Math | Leave a Comment
Much of the past week I’ve been hunting around for ideas so our Grade 8 Math teacher. As part of the Manitoba government’s push to get more technology into the classroom, well, we’re looking for ways to do that. With some digging on my own, and a good bit of help from the folks at Classroom 2.0, here’s the week’s discoveries.
Google Sketchup: This is a great product. It is basically a user friendly version of Autocad that allows you to easily draw and manipulate 3D shapes. Apparently kids from a local high school did a presentation for their school board of what they’d like the school’s new gym to be like. They “walked” the board through the new gym on a virtual tour they’d created using Sketchup. This looks like a great tool to work with for various parts of geometry and is a natural fit with the government curriculum. We’re going to be trying this one out at our school as an enrichment activity.
Web Sudoku: The popular number puzzles are available on the Web. There’s a lot of ways to adjust just how hard your puzzle is and personalize it to your taste. This is a great site for those kids who habitually finish their Math assignments early. There’s millions of puzzles available, so you never have to hear, “I’m done. What do I do next?”
Math-Kitecture: This little site seems to be about creating scale floor plans of your current classroom, and later designing your dream class. It’s a simple enough concept, and probably not one you need a website for, but the site does do a very nice job of walking you through all the steps, basically creating your lesson plan for you.
Absurd Math: This is a series of story problems. You play a hero out to defeat the enemy, and, of course, you can’t get to the next stage without solving a math problem. Is that realistic? No. Yet this still might appeal to the upper elementary kids who like superhero comic books.
Future City Competition: This site hosts a competition intended to sharpen Math and Architecture skills by doing city design using the SimCity program. I haven’t looked at this one too carefully, but it’s a really intriguing idea.
And finally, Fantasy Sports Math. This site helps you form a fantasy sports league. This is a great way for the math teacher who’s a sports fan (sadly, not me) to sharpen all kinds of math skills as the kids keep track of their favorite players and teams.
Math, I’m learning, doesn’t have to be boring.
Sep
21
Learning curves
Filed Under Musings | Leave a Comment
I started this year at a new school, much bigger than my previous one, and the past three weeks have presented a serious learning curve (Which is why I haven’t been posting here much).
Being in a new school has also been informative. For the past few years I’ve been putting assignments on the Internet, working with wikis with kids, and making tentative attempts at blogging. The kids took it in stride, and the other teachers - quite aware of what I was doing - rarely commented positively or negatively.
Here, at my school, quite a few people have sat up and taken notice. They’ve commented quite positively on some of the things I’m trying. Yesterday a few of my students were researching on the library computers and the school librarian walked over to help them. She was expecting to have to help them try to find sites for their research, but they told her she didn’t need to because I’d already provided them on my wiki.
The librarian was impressed. For me that was routine and what is described as “best practices” on the Internet. You don’t send the kids randomly searching, you give them sites to start on (and, if possible, all the ones they’ll need).
It’s exciting to have your work noticed by quite a few people, but it’s also interesting to think that maybe you’re noteworthy because you’re doing something a little bit different or maybe even in a way that adds something to your teaching.
The mastery of so many things that are computer related is something I’ve taken for granted. It seems that I’ve got a few people to teach who willingly and eagerly want help. That’s encouraging.
Sep
10
Working with Zoho
Filed Under Collaboration | Leave a Comment
I’ve become a big fan of online tools to help you share documents and collaborate with other and my new favorite site for that is Zoho.com. I’ve been pretty crazy about Google’s suite of services that includes a word processor, spreadsheet, e-mail and several other neat things. Zoho has all of that and a couple more (and their word processor looks, at first glance, better than Google’s.)
The coolest tool that Zoho adds is a database maker. You can use it to store all kinds of information. To make it useful, you can easily set up a form where you can enter data, and you can, of course, share the gathered material with other people or keep it all to yourself if you like.
This is great for all of us teachers involved in extra curricular activities. I’m helping run a Heritage Fair and if this database at Zoho works as good as it promises to, it’ll save us hours of work inputting our 300+ students’ names and project information. This could be similarly valuable for teachers running a multischool trackmeet, a science fair, or any of a dozen other similar actitivities.
Zoho has a stack of other neat features (I just discovered a quiz making feature at ZohoChallenge). If Zoho is half as good as it looks, it may come in really, really handy.
Sep
4
Creating Timelines
Filed Under History | Leave a Comment
My new best friend on the Internet is a website called Xtimeline.
As the name suggests, you use the site to make timelines. The timeline comes out looking fairly decent, but what I like is you can add descriptions of al the events on your timeline. This means that besides being a great way to help your students put order to all the disparate events in your history course, it’s also a great tool. You can giveĀ neat, tidy summaries of everything you’d want your students to know in the box. All they have to do is click on the item on the timeline that they want the information on.
As well, you can add pictures to accompany the descriptions. So if you had Confederation as one of your events, you can insert a picture of the Fathers of Confederation.
I’ve begun work on a timeline on Canadian history. So far it’s not much to brag about (I’ve only got four dates so far) but it’s a beginning to what I’ll develop over the semester.
