Make your own Widgets using Wolfram Alpha

I love using wolfram|Alpha and got this yesterday. Enjoy making your own widgets.

COMPASS Test Practice Questions - Help your COMPASS Exam Score with free COMPASS Test Preparation | Diigo

COMPASS Test Practice Questions - Help your COMPASS Exam Score with free COMPASS Test Preparation | Diigo

I clicked on this link on my Diigo bookmarks and it was automatically posted to my blog. Cool :-)

New School Year

As we get closer and closer to the beginning of the new school year,   I'm excited about so many new technology applications.

I wish that there were real universal apps for the students to use with their mobile devices.  Everyone could freely access applications no matter what devices they have.   Some popular ones include:  Iphones/Itouches/Ipads and others like Blackberry's or Android Phones.

Now, blogging is so easy to do and there's no need to learn all the HTML codes to do formatting.  I can concentrate on the how to make my blogs really useful to my students and help them all be successful this year.

Reflections

I will certainly be using blogs this year so that shy students can ask questions they usually won't ask in the classroom.  I have seen it used very well in other disciplines so I'm hoping it will be helpful to math students.

Most of my students have Ipods or Iphones so I will also be looking for apps for students to use to help them learn better.

Video resources have available in Itunes University for years and now it can be integrated into a blog. I have tried doing this from the school teacher webpage but the capability to embed video is not supported. With blogs videos can be embeded so students can easily see it instead of following a link.

With Google docs and image generators and video editing software I can see students working collaboratively on projects that can be posted and shared online.

Students may like the avatars since they already use them for many online games.

These new tools will definitely be helping me make a better virtual learning space for my students.

The most unexpected thing I found out using these tools is playing with the advanced settings is a very useful tool in learning how to use the tools. Even if I have no formal training on HTML and javascript, I was able to make a few changes on some of the scripts by changing a few of the commands and watching what happens to the output.

I think on Tool #5 the text size wouldn't come out correctly even if I set the default font size. So I finally looked at the HTML code and forced the font size to come out the the size I wanted.

I'll be looking for ideas how to use avatars for math and how to make my blogs useful to math students.

But I had fun working through the 11 Tools.

Tool #2 Building Communities and Comments

I think the idea of PLN's is great specially for a small campus like WAIS, where many of the teachers are only teaching several courses and have no one else to work with. This way we can collaborate with teachers from other campuses in the district teaching the same courses.

The blogs can be accessed through smartphones  which makes reading comments and writing comments a lot easier.

Tool #3 Image Generators and Mashups

Here's a two for one. I decided to use one of the mashup programs and used a picture of apps I have on my Iphone. Note the first app is WAIS's website :-)






I had fun with the mashups and image generators.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the students will come up with using these programs.

I use MobileMe Gallery for personal stuff and will probably use Flickr Commons area for images to download.

Here's one I made using wordle.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to use this in the classroom?

Tool #11 Digital Citizenship

The three things I will stress with my students as digital citizens will be safety online, learning how to search for information correctly and online etiquette.

I'm going to make sure my students understand the laws regarding digital citizenship.

Kids also need to be able to see what is accurate or not online. Not because it is online means it's correct. They need to learn how to fine tune their searches in order to get to the correct information.

Netiquette is another thing I will stress with the students. As a forum moderator for another site whose members are adults it's amazing how people sometimes act inappropriately online just because they don't see the other person or just because they are using an alias.

Tool #7 Digital story telling

This is a just a short video using IMovie. Took about three minutes to create. 

This is the one tool I probably need help on the most since I can pretty much edit videos but don't feel comfortable doing voice overs or narrations. 

I can see my  students using these tools for their projects in math.