So I’ve been playing a bit with Google docs in a few classes…1) Grade 8s. A communal document for review… I distributed review questions to each student and they wrote out the solutions in OneNote and clipped them into our Google Doc for everyone to see. I used the comment tool to mark it up. […]
MathML Strengthens Digital Math TextsDigital texts are moving beyond simply putting pages on a computer screen.In Kentucky, a small pilot study is demonstrating the benefits of this textbook technology for students with different learning styles. Instead of re-creating a complex math problem as a static image file, digital texts that use math markup language, or […]
Well, we’re into quadratics now. The one section is doing really well incorporating Maple into their learning process — they fluidly jump back and forth between Maple & OneNote. The other class more stubbornly holds on to doing everything by hand/calculator. I keep struggling to move this section to a more exploratory model but they […]
Well, we’ve used the Curve Fitting Tool for the past couple of classes. Lesson learned: it’s best to be descriptive in your variables because using x and y is not conducive to the CFT (it wants to use x as the regression variable).We’re on to quadratics now; I wish the spreadsheet tool was a little […]
Things that immediately pops up….Having them able to use the TEXT to describe their variables and present their solutions neatly. We focused so much on the math work that I didn’t do enough on using the text component to explain the setup and solution. Sigh…. only so many hours in a class is one excuse, […]
Well, we did a bit of direct instruction (not Direct Instruction, which is completely different… kinda like variables in poorly designed programming languages) where, in order to lead them through using Maple to get a least squares line for a set of data, I had to go through with them step-by-step. For one, I didn’t […]
Okay… well we made an attempt at Maple 12 today… just a brief introduction to graphing. I deliberately did it by assigning names to the equationsL1:=y=3x+2Then I chose to have them graph it implicitly. I’m trying to plan ahead here, so that I can use the names of the equations when they start to solve […]
It begins tomorrow. Well, actually, it doesn’t because the students don’t have their laptops tomorrow so we will just do a “welcome back to school, I’m your teacher, here’s a little activity” without involving any technology. So it will actually start on Tuesday. I’m hoping to get the permission forms approved by admin by then […]
We’ve distributed out to the students instructions on how to install Maple on their laptop before they arrive in class. Normally (and in the future, one hopes) this will be part of the tablet image that goes on to the computer before the student receives it or gets repaired but the IT department has been […]