Teaching Math with Technology

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

Posts Tagged ‘Geometry’

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!

 

I Made My First Interactive GeoGebra Applet!

Logo taken from the GeoGebra website – holiday version!

I have met several people in the past year (some only virtually) who have convinced me that learning GeoGebra would be a great addition to my tech tools for teaching mathematics. Since GeoGebra is FREE, it makes it an even better resource as a teacher and tech ed consultant, and also for student projects as well! Geometry is one of my favorite subjects to teach;  in the past I used Geometer’s Sketchpad, but in the future I plan on using GeoGebra!

I believe WordPress is not allowing me to directly embed the <applet> Javascript code for my first GeoGebra applet, so I created a new set of webpages on my Tech4MathEd site where I will be posting all of the GeoGebra applets I create.   I am just learning, so there is only 1 there now :)

To see my first interactive GeoGebra applet, which helps students understand graphing a line using the slope-intercept form of the line by interacting with the graph, go to  Slope Intercept GeoGebra Applet.

I am really looking forward to using GeoGebra, not only to create interactive applets for my Algebra students, but also to help my Math For Elementary Teacher classes learn more about Geometry!

To download  and start playing with GeoGebra, go to:  download GeoGebra

Image of my interactive applet:

 

Fun creating a Flash Animation for a 3D image in 3D!



Today I spent quite a few hours building “blocks” (cubes) from scratch in Flash and placing them into
3 dimensional space to fill a rectangular prism!

It was a visually interesting problem to try to figure out which cubes to put in first, and
which ones had to be on a higher layer in Flash then the other ones!

Plus I had to try to get them to “fit” into a geometric rectangular prism. (OK, I gave up, they didn’t fit exactly!)

The end product wasn’t too bad though! (this is a JING video taken of just part of the Flash animation)