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.