Thing #18

YouTube and TeacherTube can best be described as "you have to look through a lot of trash to find a treasure."

My excursion through YouTube didn't last long--way to much trash for me. TeacherTube was also full of trash but it was because most of the videos I looked at were very amateur. On my first search, I used the tags free, math, videos, and middle school. I got a lot of trash from elementary, middle school and high school--I guess the middle school tag is "iffy." I got tired of that so I refined my search to include a specific math subject such as Pythagorean Theorum. I think that would be a better set of criteria, but you still have to wade through a great deal of trash.

I like to use videos to introduce or reinforce a lesson just to vary the learning experience. Most of the videos I viewed would not impress my resource math students. If they don't get humor, or learning, or enjoyment of some kind, it's a waste of time.

This is a good resource and I can see math videos getting better as time goes on and more teachers learn to use the resource. This was one of two "things" so far that was not new to me.

Thing #17

Podcasts were confusing to me--I really don't know why you would use the ones I viewed in the math section in a math class. Math factor was a music video and the relation to math was so abstract that my resource math students would not understand the relationship--maybe a few gifted students might. Mathgrad was taught by a college professor and related to college concepts, some that I would have trouble with especially since it was all audio and no pictures or visual explanations at all. The third video was Dansmathcast and again it was college level and without visual explanation.

My students need a great deal of visual and kinestetic stimulation and video does that. I am pretty sure that videos are also a form of podcast because they call TeacherTube a podcast. TeacherTube has videos that are cute, even though you have to look pretty hard to find them in math. I would only use one to vary instruction.

Thing #16

I was kind of glad to find the Library Thing. Every year I go to inservice trainings that share the cutest books that I would like to share with my students and every year the list seems to get lost. I just attended the class "Start Small: Just Don't Stand Still" and I just joined the Library Thing and saved the books I thought my students might like.

Great quick resource!

Thing #15

Delicious was very interesting. I'm not sure how I would use it yet. If my math department chooses to use the math wiki to store teaching tools as a group, then I think the wiki would be the most efficient way to share resources. If not, I will probably use delicious because it would probably be easier to get to in a hurry. Of course, the wiki would have each tool separated by objective, so maybe I'll just use both.

I liked the way I could edit using delicious and I liked the ease of getting to my bookmarks. There are a lot more things I can do with it and I'm sure that will just take practice. My next goal is to see how google reader and delicious can work together to save me time in researching math videos.

All in all, I am learning a great many things in this course that I feel I will be able to use in my classroom next year.

7a

Since my son deployed to Afghanistan last week, I've been very interested in any news I can get from the region. I have a feed to my reader that gives me all the news. They come under attack at Khandahar every day, so I want to see what General Petreus is planning for the region since he is due to officially take over on Sunday.

The newest post is a speech he gave in Kabul to the troops and to NATO officials where he calls for unity in the region. He seems to be an important player because he did the same thing in Iraq.

Thing #14 (or Thing #12)

I chose to make a web page for my class. My hope is that parents would connect to the web site to see what they need to know to help their student be successful in my class. I chose the Weebly site to make the web page. So far, it is fairly easy to navigate, but I'm sure I will learn more as I go along.

This past year was exciting because most of my students had access to a computer and even more had parents who had access to a computer at work. Each year, the internet becomes a more practical tool for my class. Many of my parents prefer an e-mail to a phone call--as a past parent, this would have been more convenient for me as well.

If this web page works, in addition to class rules and supplies, I could add the math notes that go along with homework assignments so that parents can have access to material they may have forgotten over the years or never learned at all. I truly believe that the parents are the key to teaching today's student--if the parents believe in what we're doing, they will see that their children do also.

Thing #13

My cartoon was taken from the comic generator. This one was easy to create--not so easy to save. All you have to do is choose the comic strip you like and follow the prompts to input the text you like. I saved it to my document file and then couldn't open it. I still don't know why it let me add it to my blog today????

This is a very interesting section. I've never made pictures before or included them in anything I've posted on the internet. This picture was taken from the Shape Collage generator. The only thing I had to do was download the program, drag the pictures to the window, and create the collage. Then I saved the collage to my documents. Many of the pictures I made would not open once I saved them because I didn't have the right programs on my computer. This one was really simple.