Example of Fontself to Create Your Own Font
Personalize your messages with original hand-drawn fonts. Send yours now!
Videos on Multiplying Fractions
A couple of students in my on-line classes have been asking questions about multiplying fractions. Should you simplify before or after multiplying? How should you simplify? By cross-canceling directly, or by a prime factorization and cross-canceling combo? Here are some videos I have made to help clarify the situation. View on screencast.com » View on screencast.com » View on screencast.com »
Thousands of FREE Learning Resources
I have heard about these websites from various places throughout the past week. I hijacked a few of the descriptions, but I would rather give a hijacked description rather than an inaccurate description.1. CoSketch is a multi-user online whiteboard designed to give you the ability to quickly visualize and share your ideas as images. No registration or plugins required. However, I can see this being a big problem for students with a low-maturity level who would love to draw right over what the instructor is drawing. So, be careful! 2. Thinkfinity is a free digital learning platform from the Verizon Foundation…
Links from the Week – including a LCM/GCF Competition-Style Idea
Sometimes I wonder how many people actually find this more annoying than useful. 1. Maple Worksheets for Calculus - In addition to the Applets which I previously posted about, there St. Louis University also has a series of Maple Worksheets for Calculus that could prove to be useful. That is, if Maple is your thing. 2. How Much Does It Cost to Go to the SuperBowl and The History of the SuperBowl are potentially two useful Infographics for about this time of year that could provide for some discussion on Sports Statistics, etc. Although, I mainly just thought they were incredibly…
Miscellaneous Links
After a recent afternoon meeting about statistics, I needed to find a few old links that I had buried away. Well, here are a few odds and ends I found while looking: 1. Virtual Math Lab at Texas A&M - This is a very good resource for College Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, and Beginning Algebra. When I opened my link, it actually opened on 'Absolute Value Equations', which means that's probably what my students were struggling with when I initially discovered this website back in 2009. 2. Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the TI-83, TI-83+, TI-84, and TI-84+ - Although it seems like it would…
10 Potentially Helpful Resources
Here is the most recent set of helpful resources that I have sort of stumbled upon out of well over 200 hundred that I've looked at today: 1. Broad Texter - This is a service that allows you to create a group so that your students can join so that they can receive text messages from you. In fact, I've set up one for my students that I hope to use in the near future. Feel free to sign up at the top of the page if you're so inclined. 2. Smart Teaching Blog - My biggest advice when looking at…
MathZone ScreenCast
If you're teaching using MathZone, you may want to share this short screencast about this little quirk about entering expressions involving exponents with your students: View on screencast.com »
Comment on a Few Useful Tools
This comment is more here for myself than for anyone else, as I keep on forgetting about them just because I don't have them documented anywhere: 1. bit.ly - You would not believe (or maybe you would) how much this URL shortener has come in handy lately to quickly and easily customize URLs to give to my students. At one point I customized something with the student's name because the student was afraid that he would forget by the time he got home. You can't forget your name, now can you? 2. zamzar.com - Free online file conversion. I have…
Using Jing in the On-line Classroom
I just started facilitating my first on-line course ever this week. I say facilitate, because I really don't believe that I'm actually teaching the students anything in the traditional sense. In fact, they are actually learning through reading the textbook, discussion forums on ANGEL, and MathZone. However, since this is my first experience with MathZone, I don't actually have very many tips to give the students, as I am learning the quirks of the platform along with them. One of them is the way that the student must enter the multiplication symbol. I think that this tutorial that I made…
Happy New Year!
I've really been trying to avoid it, but at this point I don't think I can help it anymore. I think that the TED Talk that was featured over at The Edge of Learning sums it up well why I don't like to give away many of my New Year's Resolutions. But I want to tell someone, so since you're reading this, you're going to bear the brunt of it:1. I want to continue to lose weight in the New Year. I took the month of December off so that I could enjoy the holidays with people, but now the holidays…