Separating Prime Cuts of Educational Technology from Common “Mystery Meat”
With auburn hair and a name like Patty O’Flynn, I tend to think of St. Patty’s Day as my own personal holiday, although I must admit I’m not exactly a saint. 
And now, to appeal to your techy side, here are 8 iPhone apps for St. Patrick’s Day. My fav? I like iRish where instead of wearing a blinking “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” button, you can flash this interactive version on your phone.
Thanks to all who attended my NCCE session, Moodling in Math. For those who would like more information, here is a link to our session’s Moodle site.
Session Highlights:
If I could suggest one way to begin using Moodle with your students, would be to begin creating a class glossary.
Forums are a great way to continue class discussions beyond the classroom. They help teachers to assess student learning and get students to talk math!
The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is not freeware, but it is free of charge for those working for publicly-funded non-profit-making educational institutions, who make their pages available on the web.
Students regularly complete a variety of formative and summative assessments via the web including formative quizzes, “tickets to retake”, and summative assessments.
As the instructor, I regularly provide video tutorials of class lessons/topics to support student learning in the classroom. In addition, students typically create several video projects throughout the year including screen recordings of their work, math music videos, and an end-of-year movie.
I use Moodle to deliver projects and assignments other than the typical “book work”.. This allows students to access class presentations, handouts, and templates, and assignments are typically uploaded and graded through Moodle.
I’m currently preparing to present at NCCE 2009 in Portland this February. My session is regarding the ways in which my students and I use Moodle in our math classroom. It should be a great conference and I hope to see you there!
February 17-20, 2009
Oregon Convention Center
Portland Oregon
Find out how school districts are saving money with Open Source Software and how it can improve teaching and learning in the classroom!
Workshops
Educators, Administrative Leaders and Technical Staff will experience how Open Source Software increases both access and opportunities for students and teachers.
Concurrent Sessions
SEARCH LEARN and EXPLORE @ www.ncce.org
Darren Kuropatwa at A Difference has posted a keynote speech, Games as Innovative Teaching, given by Rick Van Eck at the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Conference. I really enjoyed this presentation; it certainly should make educators think about the ways we educate students today and how to engage students in learning. Please click here to view a video of this presentation as well as the slideshow.
You can also hear the audio of Van Eck’s breakout session on Games Based Learning and view his slideshow here. This session is full of very practical ideas for how to incorporate using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games in teaching a variety of subjects in the K-12 curriculum.
During our study of polynomials, I used Hot Potatoes software to create several drag&drop quizzes for my students. I love using these activities with the digital whiteboard as a whole class activity and then I can also make them available to students to use as a self assessment. If you’d like to view our quizzes, just click on the image at the right and look for the files titled Polynomial Graphs under Ch. 6
If you have no special equipment or software, here is an example of a mathcast of Euler’s Formula created using LaTex and CamStudio, both of which are free. LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system that includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. CamStudio is free screen recording software with audio. If you would like to begin creating mathcasts but don’t have any special equipment, these are definitely two tools to check out!
Qipit is a free online tool that allows you to copy documents, whiteboards and handwritten notes with your camera phone or digital camera to store, fax, email or publish. Just take a picture of a document with your camera phone and send the picture from your phone or via email to copy@qipit.com. You’ll receive a link to the online PDF copy of your document, all for free. I have other ways to share my whiteboard slides and notes, but this would be a great tool for students.
I found out about Qipit from the article 10 Useful Web Applications You Don’t Know About
In his blog, Tom Barrett discusses how he plans to use a Wii game system to teach and reinforce math concepts in his classroom.
I can’t wait to see the creative ways in which teachers use this technology!
Rick Broida at Cnet gives a list of dirt-cheap tech gifts for the holidays:
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