Math Hombre

Playing to Learn - Maria Anderson

Don't let me tell you, see for yourself.  (Link goes to Maria's famous Prezi.)  Other suggestions:

• If you assign a game, can ask them to play to a certain score.  Or post a screenshot of their high score in the discussion board.
• A good game gets harder as you get better.
• Look for when the math is the game.  Not just practice.
• Line Gem
• Factortris
• Manga High - several games with good content and game play, and superhigh production values.  I signed up yesterday, and I've already gotten unsolicited emails asking to help me upload students name.
• Waker - this is a wicked fun game of graphing that also has nice situational problem-solving.  (That's the screenshot at right.)  Compare to Woosh.  (Nice learning experiment: does narrative help? It must, right?)
• Jane McGonagol on gaming for a better world. (TED)
•  Support the development of good math games.  Say you'll use them, describe what makes the good ones good.

Presentations.  Our assignment: 5 min, 20 slides, (quick, how long per slide?) to share what we learned, resources to share, and our goals going forward.

My Prezi. Pretty lame for such a good week.

From the presentations:

• Big impact:  things that allow us to share  what we do.  Jing, Squidoo, Mindomo, Mindmeister, Prezi, Google sites, blogging, ...
• Better life: Using tech to organize ourselves and improve efficiency.  Eg. Using PBworks for class materials and not having to repeat them for each section/class, MathType, Symbaloo, Doodle, Tablet PCs and Wacom tablets, Soluto, Organize Your Digital Self (Maria's mindmap), Dropbox for sync, backup and storage, SpacedEd, ...
• New tools: Search-Cube, Cool Iris, Virtual Magnifier, SnagIt, Animoto, WinPlot, showmewhatswrong.com (Jing with no install), TodaysMeet.com, HootCourse (uses existing twitter and facebook accounts), Wolfram Alpha, Zoomerang, clickers, Camtasia, Online Stopwatch, Zotero research tool, bitly URL shortener, Vpython 3D python programming made easy (?), PrimoPDF free PDF maker, ...
• Fun: avatar editing (VOKI even), Imagination Cubed,  ...
• Resources: Cyberchase activities, National Library of Virtual Manipulatives, Cool Text graphics generator, InterActMath a supplement to college textbooks, PhET simulations, ...
• Collaborate: Twitter, GALE,  ...
• Goals: presentations, innovations in teaching, sharing with colleagues at home, establish online presence, ... In short, go forth and do stuff.

One person even used DimDim to present remotely!  How tech is that?

Was a good week.  If it's open next year - you should consider it.  We could all use a little change.

Why do we have Norse-named days anyway?  I want a cartoon here of Thor's screwdriver and pliers.


Wolfram|Alpha - Maria Anderson

• Start playing with Wolfram Alpha.  Enter line (1,2) (5,5).  Wow.  Notice what extra information there is.  Maria set us the problem of how to graph a line with a point and a slope.  (Took some work.)
• How to have students share: best in a chat room, where students can chat the cool entries that they find.  Otherwise can use a discussion board.  An interesting post is that the URL with your result will always bring up that exact same page you saw. Well, with the proviso...
• Wolfram|Alpha is updated weekly.  If it can't do it now, try next week.
• Maria's favorite Wolfram Alpha posts.
• See the data available on a specific topic: here's my town - Grand Haven, nutrition, etymology of a word (Even shows rhymes! But not for orange.)
• Try comparisons: cities, companies, species (took some clicking on options to get this result), publications, ...
• Notice or beware that this works on smartphones.  (Goodbye TI)
• Is W|A skynet?

Specific Uses

• Have students use Skynet W|A to factor.  What do they notice? Connections with graphs? Can they generalize?
• Careful: log(x) means natural log to W|A.  lg(x) means log_10 (x)
• Find data they are interested in for applications, display, etc.
• Replace graphing calculators.
• On assessments, give them the graph or info they would have gotten from W|A.  Now what can they do with it.

Consider the uses for this.  Maria's example was: you go into a hospital.  A nurse, one of your former students, is calculating a dose.  Do you want her going by memory of what you taught, or using the W|A on her smartphone?   What if the nurses you've taught are at about 70% on average?


Synchronous learning - Jill Mueller

Wiziq

• Free.  Do need to sign up.  Anyone can be a teacher.  Classes have whiteboard (with tools), audio, chat, ...
• Teacher turns on permissions for students: whiteboard, microphone, etc.
• Has some basic math symbols in the whiteboard typing.
• Compare to Elluminate
• Teacher can turn on screen sharing to show what's on for them.  Very handy with MathXL or ... anything.  Can't chat while sharing a screen.
• Non-teachers can share screen, but it shows up as a non-resizable window.
• Can monitor wiziq window and your screen share simultaneously.

Vyew

• Many similar features
• Create a lobby, and then you link students to there.  Vs. creating a new link with each session in Wiziq.
• Don't have to register, you can just join.
• Teacher can set status of participants.
• There's a screen sharing tab, and it doesn't obscure the chat.  (Not sure how the teacher will see the chat without switching back to the vyew window, which will then show itself, infinity, boom. )

One of the participants recommended DimDim, saying that it integrates well with Moodle.

My gut reaction is that I'd use  wiziq for one time or infrequent sessions, vyew for a regular gig.  Students could bookmark your lobby, and make it dead easy to connect.

Open Session

• Finish my Camtasia student film
• Start my required mini-presentation for tomorrow
• Work on mindmap on Conditions of Learning
• Google document to share participants' contact info (nice idea, Susan)

Water heater went this morning so I missed some goodstuff.  Sorry!




Presentation Design - Maria Anderson
Looks like they discussed topic generation, organizing potential slides and ideas with stickies, and the importance of visuals to go with presentation.  Literally a visual for every point.



Some resources:

• Maria's blogpost on designing digital presentations.
• Presentation Zen:  11 ways to use images poorly
• Garr Reynolds' Organization and Presentation Tips
• Slideology Blog and Book
• Sample Prezi on Levers of Change in Higher Education

Modes of presentation:

• Prezi - groovy visual organizer for slides with very flexible positioning and sizing.  Video imbeddable from youtube, or you can upload .flv. 
• Animoto - turns a slide show into a video with some slick animation and a soundtrack.  Easy to imbed, upload and share.  Big trick: in Powerpoint, save as jpegs, then they will upload directly.  Spotlight images you want for emphasis.  Easiest to add text in PowerPoint.  Can include video.  Sadly, free accounts can only do 30 sec video, but with the educator account, you can give students access to your account.
• Mindomo ,  Mindmeister - mindmaps.  (I might have to use Mindmeister just because of the Music Meister.  Who is the Music Meister?)  Mindomo is flash so no iPad or iPhone.  Mindmeister is HTML5, but has slightly fewer features.
• What mode to choose?  Consider: venue, audience, time, digital or not, and presentation style
• Venue: tech available? 1 computer per participant? Room setup? In a computer lab, go for interactivity; for example, mind maps.
• Content: lots of screenshots, consider just powerpoint.  Full frame easy to see images.
• Completely digital: not very long, just want to get across a clear single point (eg. function notation)
• Impact: prezi to make a big impact.  Levers of Change was for futurists, and a big wow was wanted.

 From Dilbert.  Obviously.

Camtasia Editing - Conan Heiselt

Camtasia is better than Jing for long format screencast videos, can record from screen and webcam, and has a fairly robust editor.

Editing tips

• Export formats: Quicktime (.mov) for most purposes.  Html creates a webpage with a player and a .swf file, but you need to be able to upload folders to make that work online.
• Control the speed of actions by  their duration.  Actions are transitions from one set of properties to another set.  About a second as a rule of thumb, effects for a second.  Adjust to make your point.
• Visual effects have meaning, whether you intend them to, or not.  Fade is the most gentle.  Say instead of a shift of seconds you want a shift of hours.  Use a different effect to make your point.
• Types of effects are transitions, filters and actions.
• Smartfocus effect is an action that allows the camera to focus in on where your mouse travels.  Smartfocus only works on Camtasia recordings, as they use extra data that was collected by the program.
• Filters apply in order.  Sometimes this matters but often it doesn't.  Example:  color adjustment, then colorize is more effective.  On the timeline, you can right-click, copy filters to new objects.
• Properties gearbox allows access to important information and control.  But most things you can do through other tools.  Exception:  rotations of the input video.
• Custom video action does nothing by itself, but you can learn to use it to do all the transitions.
• To change aspect ratio hold down shift while resizing.  Default is to preserve aspect ratio because it's video.
• Choose canvas size, add effects, organize... but do cuts last.  They are the "most destructive" and the hardest to undo.

Creating or "Look, Ma, I'm a director!"

• Scripts are helpful.  Ummm... minimize hesitations and... um.... keep you on flow.
• Storyboards: not for everyone, but can be very helpful.
• Instead of cutting a clip to get rid of verbal miscues, you can separate the audio and video, and just cut out the offending audio.  You can also do that to keep audio you want without video.  Cut out a corresponding bit of audio later, and realign the clips.
• Beware of video-noise.  Use zooms and smartfocus (or the custom action to get that effect).  Arrows to direct attention.  (Turn arrows in the property box rather than rotate them parallel to the clip to make the gradient look right.)  Window Spotlight blurs everything outside of a region set apart by contrast.
• Camtasia uses "tweening" with actions.  Accelerates them in and decelerates them out, as opposed to having them happen with a constant speed.  Can create some strange effects
  by layering actions.

Sharing

• Youtube: Choose Youtube or Youtube HD.  Understand it is going to be shrunken down.  Advantages - well known, great indexing for search, better for attracting followers.
• Screencast:  can embed from screencast.com (TechSmith's videohosting site.) Advantages - doesn't reencode, so clearer, and more control.  You can password protect it, make collections, only allow access to a single movie, etc.  Screencast is where Jing stores video.
• Blackboard: might be better to use another sharing option then link.
• iPhone and iPad: export to .mp4

Good Examples

• Math Train
• Khan Academy
• Camtasia Learning Center

Should I put up my sample or not?

Previously: Monday

Clickers/Classroom Response Systems: with Derek Bruff.  Worthwhile even if you're not using clickers, because of the focus on pedagogy and student activity.

• Near riot as we discussed: where does most of the mass of a tree come from: a) soil b) air c) water d) sunlight.  "Right answer"= (b) because of carbon.  (I dissent: 
• Best clicker questions will provoke discussion.  Had a nice teacher move flowchart.
• Many traditional systems.  Also polleverywhere.com, and ResponseWare's smartphone/web solutions.
• Math questions like: You were once exactly 3 feet tall.  T/F
• Can ask with confidence rating.  i.e. Yes - High Confidence, Yes - Low Confidence, No - Low Confidence, No - High Confidence.
• Conceptual vs. Procedural questions - Both work.  Key question: do answers allow students to work backwards from answers?  (OK if that's intentional.) Can give them steps in the procedure and ask to find the error.
• http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/ - article on CRS are active and valuable assessment.
• http://mathquest.carroll.edu/resources.html - Sample clicker question bank.
• Create Time for Telling: make moments that create curiosity and the responses of peers matter to each student.  Then they want you to tell them why or how.  Motivationally they are ready.  Often comes when most of the students are wrong.
• Can use for peer assessment.  Students are hesitant to publically evaluate someone.
• Used for quizzes turns assessment into learning ops.

Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age: Projects - Maria Anderson, MindMap
Framework: Pride-Teach

• Practicing or repeating
• Reading
• Internet
• Discussing
• Experiencing
• Thinking or reflecting
• Experimenting
• Academic
• Created
• Hearing or watching

Ideas

• How do you learn?  Evaluate 5 things you've learned recently with these standards.  What do you notice?
• Started using projects to align how we expect our students to learn with how we learn.
• Cf. Marias el ed class: http://teachingcollegemath.com/?p=1632 
• Cf. student presentations. Maria records feedback in Jing and gives video feedback.  By the rubric that students have up front.
• These projects had beneficial effects on student performance on other assessments, and definitely addressed 21st century skills.

Mathematica - PlotFest - Deb Wood

We experimented with controls in the plotting functions of Mathematica.  Hard for me to attend to because its use is beyond many of my students tech skills, and the classes where it would be appropriate, we use Maple.  Some people are exploring Geogebra instead.  (Obviously, I'm down with that.)

Resources:

• Demonstrations from Wolfram, a huge collection of Mathematica Notebooks.  These can be "played" using the free Mathematica player.
• Training videos that show some of the basic and advanced how-tos.
• Video of Deb talking about Mathematica

Peripheral Tablet/Tablet PC

• Works well with Windows Journal or OneNote or Jarnal.  (Jarnal's free and open source.)  If you have a tablet PC you might want WinPenPal.
•  Can use with Jing for helping students on WebAssign or MyMathXL, etc. because...
• Allows you to quickly write or jot math.  One instructor at the session uses it to give notes, and then just posts the files online. 
• It is easy to just drag images from wolfram-alpha, the web, or TI-Smartview to include in your handwritten notes.

Second Life - Evert VanderBerg

• Free to create your avatar.
• Download the Second Life viewer.
• Set the rating of your account: General, Moderate, Mature, Adult.  (Choose wisely.)  Have to live 30 days before you can change more extreme than moderate, or by verifying with a credit card.
• Avatar names are unique.  Common first names might be used up.
• Second Life Wiki
• Evert uses 2ndLife for discussions with people from all over.  Better discussions with sense of close ___location.  This can change with weird or distracting avatars, so ask your students to 
• SlideShare pres on Math Ed in 2ndLife
• Search for freebies or swapmeet, teaching to find free gestures, like pointing.
• Can upload images, for ten Linden each.  (Cheap but not zero.)
• Some of the math involved seems just to be in the design and manufacture of the sims.  See this site for example.  There's a free Math Sculptor.
• Any given moment there are 50-100K users; 2 million active accounts.
• Sounds like we should look up Janita Collins.

This week I'm at Maria Anderson's Math and Tech Workshop.  I'll try to update this post as we go through the week.  There's a large Explorers group and I'm in the Adventurer's group.

Adventurers brainstormed the following for discussion.  So look for more on this this week.

• Wolfram Alpha
• Attention-Getters
• Textbooks: cost, open source
• Geogebra
• Vyew
• Student interaction
• Twitter/texting
• Math Ed Research on Tech

Resources:

• Textbook cost: article in NYT 
• Math Ed Tech Research: CITE Journal, which has different topic areas, including math.

Social Media:

• Use Facebook pages for students.  They like the page and get those updates rather than your updates.
• Go over privacy settings with your students.  They are often ignorant of the reality. Check your own.
• Linked In: limited use, like a modern rolodex.
• Twitter: internet equivalent of drinking from a firehose.
• Twitter is more collegial.  Follow people who have worthwhile info to you, get nearly instantaneous feedback, hashtags to organize.
• Twapper Keeper (love that) to archive tweets.
• Twitter is a completely public space.
• Math Blogs: a node on Maria's MindMap of Spicing Up Mathematics

Finally got time to play with Scratch.  I'm wondering about it as an activity directly for students, for preservice teachers, or as an instructional design tool to make activities.  Here's my first - kind of like pidgin Logo.




Learn more about this project

The end of the afternoon is working on Mathematica. It has developed quite a bit in the 15 years since I've last used it!