Elluminate and I-chat and Skype...oh my!

For the first time in this class, I was a little overwhelmed today. I have seen and heard of Skype, so I was a bit familiar with it, even though I have never used it. Elluminate was a different story, as was i-chat. There was so much there that I was having a little trouble following along. I can see some value in these programs - I like the idea of having "experts" talk to classes and I think it would be great for math classes to hear from people like engineers or economists who use math in the "real world". Skype seems like a great way to do this.

Podcasts

I wanted to comment on two podcasts that I really enjoyed from our class project.

Jeanne and Patrick had a really good idea connecting To Kill a Mockingbird with the American Civil Rights movement - and did a great job incorporating audio clips from people involved in that movement.

I also thought that Marc, Greg and Marta did an excellent job with the audio editing - even commercials! I was definitely impressed! The only suggestion I would have made is that if you had been able to find a scientist or mathematician of Hispanic descent, it would have incorporated an element of that culture to further tie in with the Spanish component.

Both of these podcasts met the goal of being entertaining while educational.

I'm Feeling SMART!!

I really enjoyed using the SMARTBoard in class, but it made me want to know more! I've downloaded the software and have had fun exploring a little bit. I would definitely be interested in learning more, because I'm sure that there's a whole new world available in terms of how the board can be used. We have barely even scratched the surface and I can't wait to find out what's out there!

Thinkfinity...

...is awesome! I was familiar with some of the partner sites (like NCTM's Illuminations), but to have so much information compiled in one place, organized so that you can access what you want quickly and easily is great. I especially liked the link to the NYS standards, which for math give links to specific activities geared to many of the standards. This will save so much time when looking for an appropriate activity.

Podcasts

Wow - class this week was fun! I really enjoy learning new things, so working with Audacity and learning about podcasts was so interesting...I'm still trying to come up with ways to use this in a math class, but I'm sure there are lots of ideas out there. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. I think that the students would enjoy doing this so much, it would be worth a little effort to make it work. Maybe even a multi-discipline approach, like a math history project.

I'm looking forward to learning lots of new things like this over the course of this semester!

Electronic Quizzes

I was really interested in the electronic quiz concept we talked about in class this week. My only concern with the Excel quiz was that the student's answer has to match the answer the teacher enters exactly. This could create a problem if the spelling, punctuation or format is slightly different, or for example the student answers USA instead of United States. Even math problems could be problematic (no pun intended!) if the format isn't quite the same. I'm thinking about ways to get around this problem, such as pre-formatting cells for numbers, or using multiple choice questions where the student would only have to enter a single letter or number in the answer field.

It's definitely an option I'd like to use in my classroom if possible, so I'll definitely work on ways to make it as fool-proof as possible!