Playing around, web tools and teaching math

Big surprise. A blog titled "Technology and Education", and here is a posting that is actually about technology used in education.

Here is an embedded Brainshark presentation on using wikis for math instruction. Brainshark allows you to upload a PowerPoint presentation (also supports OpenOffice presentations), and then record audio for each slide. The audio-enhanced presentation can then be shared using embedded HTML (as is the case here).



And here is a short video experiment with students to portray math concepts. The video is extremely rough -- I made a big mistake in shooting the video that made it very difficult to get the exact special effect I wanted. It's close, but not quite right: next time, shoot each student separately. I shot the student who appears twice separately, but included the middle student, the one holding the equals sign, in both clips. It was difficult to get rid of one of her, so I finally ended up just shifting the video position slightly so one clip overlayed the other. Just don't look too closely. And our green screen is a bit ratty. Editing was done in Adobe Premiere (CS4). It is mainly proof of concept, to give the kids an idea of what to do when we get to the project. The video is shared via Vimeo. As you can see, I didn't get the still frame right.

The Symmetric Property from James Davis on Vimeo.

And here is a comic strip (again an example for the students), using MakeBeliefsComix.com. I like the MakeBeliefsComix simplicity of creating comics with the site -- no logins; and easy to use, intuitive tools. The downside is students can't save comics and go back to edit them, and there is no jpg export. Students need to either print the comic to a PDF file, and convert, or do a screen grab of the comic on the web page. Students can also email a link to the comic to the teacher.




The classroom wiki is barely getting started, but here is a link:

Dvorak Algebra 2010

jd