Sunburst technology for math class

This week we were assigned to look at Award Winning Publisher Software for our area of discipline so I decided to look at what the Sunburst software had to offer as far as math programs for educators. I was impressed by the multitude of programs that it found for teaching math classes. There were programs ones on number, sense concepts, and operations and others on algebra and trigonometry. I took a closer look at one of the algebra ones to get a better sense of what these programs were like. Under the algebra heading alone there was 12 different programs categorized by the different grade levels that they were designed for. These programs let students compete against other students or against a computer player and also record the individual students progress so that the teacher alone can see it which is great because that way students feel like they are playing a game instead of learning through a lecture format and the teacher is able to track where each individual students learning level is at in different concepts.
To figure out if this is a good software program to buy you can evaluate it using a Software Evaluations Rubric which includes the ease of use, the documentation and support, the ability levels, the built in assessment tools available, and the technical quality as well as the recommendations of others.
However, a down side to all of this is home much these programs cost. Most of the programs have a wide range for prices with the most inexpensive ones ranging from the up 50s to seventies and with the most expensive ranging from the upper 700s to the upper 800s. Depending on your school budget it makes getting these programs a challenge and it is wise to check out a free online demo or download first so that you are sure that the program you are buying is money well spent.

Second Life: the good, bad, and the ugly

This week we were asked to examine the virtual reality tool known as Second Life sparing nothing looking at the good bad and the ugly.

So lets start off positive and look at the good. Second Life can be used as a good tool for education in the way that it allows a teacher to be able to set up real world examples of things that students could not see otherwise. For example Second Life can be used as tool to provide the teacher a way to set up a virtual tour for their students of Ancient Rome.

However Second Life has many negatives in the way that it would take an extraordinary amount of time to build the virtual world of Ancient Rome as well as the fact that everything that one does in Second Life costs money even though it is at a much reduced rate to what things would cost in the real world being around $1 of real money equaling 100 fake dollars on Second Life. Second life is also bad in the way that it is an obsessive thing that you pour your real hard-earned money into buy things in this virtual world such as going to a U2 concert instead of actually experiencing such things in real life.

Second Life can also be very ugly. Second Life can consume peoples life where they are spending all of their time building this virtual life instead of actually living their own life. On Second Life people get married and divorced and there has even been cases in which people have found out their spouse on second life was married in real life and considered them an adulterer because they should divorce their spouses in real life before they get married in Second Life

Although Second Life can be awful and used improperly it also can have some redeeming point in education such that it can be used to illustrate places that your students could not have been able to go or see before even places throughout history. However I believe that the little benefit that you can get from it as a teacher does not outweigh the horrible nature of the program as well as the time and money that you would have to put into making a project like this in which the educator would put way more time into then the educational advances that they would get out of it.

Google Earth

Google Earth is a tool created by Google that can transport you to any part of the world (now including the moon). Google earth is a virtual reality tool that is computer illiterate friendly. In order to use Google Earth to the fullest one should download it for free. The newest version of Google Earth is Google Earth 5 which includes historical imagery from around the world, Ocean floor and surface data from marine experts, and Simplified touring with audio and voice recording. In addition Google Earth gives its user the ability to film tours to any place in the world. You can fly to any place in the world by giving the address of the place you want to go. You can then mark the location you found with a placemark. Also if the user wishes to look at their favorite baseball stadium they can do so and visualize the 3D picture of it. Google Earth can even take you back in time or even change the time of day. In general Google Earth is the gateway to a whole new form of technology.

Google Earth could be incorporated into a mathematics classroom to help show pyramids and to teach the law of sin, law of cosine, and basic trig to a Calculus class, geometry class, or even algebra with the Pythagorean Theorem. The Great Pyramids of Giza can be found and then you can use the information attached to it's location (a snipping from Google Earth is located above and to the right). With the information provide a student can find the angles of the pyramids, the height, or even how the shadow long the shadow cast by the pyramids during any given time of day. This can be quite useful and a fun interactive way to use it in the classroom. Then after this the students could even pick a landmark that interests them and perform the same tasks done in class as a project grade.

Pascal's Triangle

Microsoft SharePoint Designer

Microsoft SharePoint Designer is a software program that provides the user with a convenient and easy-to-use format for designing web pages. It is an HTML editor that can publish sites from either local to remote or remote to local with one click of a button. SharePoint allows users to preview their web pages before publishing in the default internet browser. It is easy to use SharePoint to make a website when you begin with an index page, and split it into a navagation bar, a banner, and the main page. From there, other pages can be created and hyperlinked from the index page. SharePoint allows you to use cascade style sheets, which are pre-determined color schemes. All you need to do to color each page is drag the cascade style sheet to that page, and it will transform your background and text color and font. Sharepoint allows internal hyperlinks, hyperlinks to an already existing file, and hyperlinks to a new page.

Although I really enjoyed learning SharePoint designer because I have never done anything with web pages before, I do not think that a website would be too useful to me in my mathematics classroom. Perhaps I could use it to post links to homework assignment in Word (using Equation Editor), however I plan on giving all of the students hard copies of the assignments anyway. Sometimes schools already have websites and allow each teacher to have a little part of that website for posting information. That being said, it is extremely important to continue to be knowledgable about technology as a teacher. Just in case something comes up where I would need to know all about website design, I am glad that I now have this tool.