Patty Papers

Here’s my Friday math joke. Yeah, it’s corny, but it made me laugh.

I have just posted two Camtasia Studio screencast tutorials for my students.

The first shows how to add markers within a Camtasia project.

The second movie shows how to produce your Camtasia project as a Flash movie with a table of contents.

These tutorials can be found at Mathematics with Mrs. O’Flynn on our Mathcasts page under Technology.

For those who want to learn more about mathcasts, I’m pleased to announce that Tim Fahlberg along with a wonderful team of partners (including yours truly  ) will be conducting a session at NECC entitled Mathcast Spaces: Thinking, Doing, and Sharing Mathematics Out Loud.

Tagging, Tumbling, and Mathcasting posted by Paul Allison is a jam-packed thirty-nine minutes that explores the power of tagging, teachers using tumblogs, mathcasts, VoiceThreads in health, speech, history, math, music, technology, and EFL classes. This session includes an interview with my friend, Tim Fahlberg, on mathcasts. What’s a mathcast, you ask? Well, mathcasts are screencasts (screen movies) of writing with voice that focus on mathematics, and Tim is the pioneer in this field who got me and my students started 3 years ago.

Click here to learn more about mathcasts and to view mathcasts created by me and my students. You can also learn more about mathcasts by visiting Tim’s mathcast wiki at http://math247.pbwiki.com/.

If you’d like to begin creating mathcasts and you use a Windows PC, then FreeScreenCast can make screencasting simple for you.

Just install the screencast recorder, select the part of the screen you want to record, record it, upload your screencast, and then share it. Give it a try!

from http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/freescreencast/

Pre Calculus students have finished their mathcasts of trigonometry involving right triangles.

Projects are now posted at Mathematics with Mrs. O’Flynn: Mathcasts under Pre Calculus, Periods 2 and 5, Ch 6 Triangle Trigonometry. Their next task is to evaluate their own movie using this checklist and feedback form and to get at least one other person (adult or student who is not a group member) to give them feedback.

My students would appreciate your feedback! Please send feedback to

Students were randomly placed in groups using the “pick a student” feature in CPS and were then given a problem having to do with polynomials from an ExamView problem bank. Each group or pair then created a mathcast of their solution and their reasoning. Some groups still have to finish up tomorrow but several are now posted at Mathematics with Mrs. O’Flynn: Mathcasts under Periods 1 and 6, Ch 6 Polynomials. Their next task is to evaluate their own movie using this checklist and feedback form and to get at least one other person (adult or student who is not a group member) to give them feedback.

My students would appreciate your feedback! Please send feedback to

Next year I will have the opportunity to teach one section of mathematics as an online course. I’m working with one of our English teachers right now to develop our “wish list” if features that we would like to have for our online class. Here are some things I am considering:

• I plan to create mathcasts of daily lessons using my Hitachi Starboard so that students still have the experience of seeing and hearing mathematics. Using Camtasia Studio, some of these mathcasts will have embedded assessments within them and results will collected.
• I want a forum where students can post questions to me or other students.
• I want students to have access to assignments and assessments online.
• I want a way to engage in live group chat with audio and with shared access to my Hitachi Starboard.

The mathcasts, forum and assignments/assessments will be easy enough since I’m already using these with my regular classes, but I’m not sure how exactly to accomplish the chat. However, I have the privilege of working with a fantastic tech department here in Woodland School District that has worked very hard in the past to make my wish lists become reality, so I’m sure they’ll find a way to pull it off. However, I am taking over some homemade chocolate chip cookies today; never hurts to sweeten the deal.

My students have published their first round of mathcasts this year. My Algebra 2 classes recorded portions of their cup lab in which they find a linear function that approximates the height of stacked cups, and our Pre Calculus mathcasts show and explain how to graph a sinusoid. You can view these projects at our school site under Mathcasts at http://www.woodlandschools.org/index.php?q=node/741 .

My classroom was featured in a recent article by Tamar Snyder entitled Social Networking: TheirSpace at Edutopia.org. 

Please visit the link above to view the full article. You can also read the article in Edutopia Magazine.