Teaching Math with Technology

Taking math education into the 21st century, and bringing my students and visionary teachers along for the ride!

Category : Camtasia

Getting Organized

ADDING MY VIDEOS TO THIS BLOG

I have heard from several people that they would like to see some of the educational videos I have created.  I realize there was a pull down menu at the top of my blog for it, but I never actually organized the content I have created in the past.

In the past 6 months I have had to wipe both my Mac and my Windows machine (long stories), so some of my videos are now “lost’, but luckily YouTube still has a small collection.

I finally got organized today and separated my videos into categories.  If you look along the top of my blog, you will see a category called “Animations/Videos” :



Most of my videos fall in to four categories of  ”How-To” videos, “Educational Teaching Videos”, “Flash Animated Tutorials”, and “Livescribe pencasts”.  I will be adding some Animationish videos after this Fall when I have my students creating some.

I created the “How-To” videos to teach others how to use software or hardware.  Here are the categories I have in that section:

I plan on adding more videos to this section in the near future, so some of the categories do not have any links yet.

The next main category I have been creating videos for is in “Educational Teaching Videos”.  These are short videos I have created for my students to introduce a topic we are studying in the class.

As you can see when you look through the Educational Teaching videos, I was trying out several types of hardware/software to see what worked best.   I used the eInstruction Workspace software for a “whiteboard” in some videos, and recorded and edited with Camtasia studio.  In other videos I used a Lumens HD Ladibug document camera.  I found the document camera to be better for me when I am actually needing to record working with actual objects like base ten blocks and fraction circles.   I will hopefully be making more videos using these this semester. I will try to keep up with posting them here so I don’t lose them again!!

Most of the tutorials/lessons I have created for my students in the past year are Livescribe pencasts, but I find when I need the lesson to be more visual, a video is better.    My livescribe pencasts are organized by topic on THIS PAGE.  I have quite a few pencasts collected there.   When I had to wipe my computers, I lost all the original pencasts, so for now I cannot change any of those pencasts into PDF’s to download.

Lastly, about six years ago I started created Flash animated tutorials to help my students in my Math For Elementary Teachers classes better visualize the math they will be teaching. I strongly believe visualization is key to understanding!

The Flash animated tutorials are housed on a separate area (outside of my blog).   They are organized by arithmetic topic:

For example, clicking on the “1/3″ would take you to the fraction tutorials, and the “2″ will take you to the multidigit whole number operations.  This type of tutorial takes me a lot longer to create, so I do not have many in some areas (like decimals).   Instead, I am starting to create more interactive tutorials using Hyperstudio.  To see a few of those interactive tutorials, CLICK HERE.

These are still a work in progress, but I promise to continue adding here so check back!

 

 

Summer Projects for Visual and Interactive Math

Visual Interactive Learning
I have been sitting here staring at my computer for the past week since I got back from an amazing time with a room full of extremely innovative teachers in San Francisco as part of the Livescribe Educational Advisory Board.

I keep staring at it not being able to decide where to start!  I have so many new ideas that I want to implement for the Fall, and now I have even more resourceful people to guide me when I get stuck!

Some of the big ones on my list I have already started working with, but I want to dig deeper and create projects for my students to interact with, and also projects for them to create:

Hyperstudio5 (Roger Wagner will be at ISTE this summer, so that will be fun!)
GeoGebra
Camtasia
Livescribe (new cool stuff coming next week!!)

The newest application I want to learn:

I have been playing with WolframAlpha for the past year, but I recently purchased Mathematica and I am excited to see what I can create with it! My goal is to create visual and interactive materials for Algebra and Geometry.    I will post as soon as I start building!  I am still watching the video tutorials for now.   I want to look further into the following links as well:

Wolfram Research STEM Initiative

Wolfram Faculty Program

Lastly, I NEED to learn Photoshop.   My oldest son currently creates all of my artwork for my projects, but in a few years he will be off to college and won’t be around to help me!

Hopefully between spending time with my family and attending ISTE and HI-TEC this summer, I will be able to dig deeper and create some projects for next Fall using some of these great interactive applications!

 

Welcome to the NEW domain for Tech4MathEd!

Welcome to my new “home”

I gave in…I became aware today of the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

I was using the FREE WordPress.com, but was not able to embed any of the flash based files I wanted to.   So I took the plunge over to WordPress.org and got my own domain for a WordPress blog so NOW I can embed Flash!

I am still trying to decide on a theme, because the theme I was using there isn’t available here.   I also need to straighten up some of the blog postings that got messed up in the transfer, but I WAS able to go ahead and embed EVERY file I had wanted to earlier, including:   Livescribe pencasts, YouTube videos, Prezi presentations, Jing and Camtasia videos!   Deep sigh of relief!  I hope you will join me on the new site for my blog!   I could use some suggestions on the theme, too :)

Sue Glascoe

~following my North Star!

 

Learning to use Camtasia (by TechSmith) – a great way to record my desktop!

I just downloaded Camtasia for both Mac and Windows.  I happened to be on my Mac when a student emailed me with a homework question, so I thought I would respond and try out Camtasia for Mac at the same time!   Here is the result.

I still need to learn to edit the video and add cool comments and arrows and all the other great stuff I “know” Camtasia can do.   But I am willing to go ahead and share my very first screencast with you to show you how easy it is to get started!

Here is the link:   http://www.screencast.com/t/MjQzMTA5ZGQt

I finally have my OWN domain so that now I CAN embed Flash!  * added May 10,2010