Tools for students

Hi all,

Here are some tools I use with my students to help them understand math better:

WabbitEMU - an android app that simulates the ti-84 calculator.  Makes your android into a perfectly functioning graphing calculator, and more importantly, helps students learn the graphing calculator so they can use that tool during tests, even if they don't have a graphing calculator of their own.

Khan Academy - For anybody, at any age range, the SAT study guide is perfect.  It will track what you know and adjust, and show you what you still need to know.  I plan to use it to take the graduate tests I need to take in the near future, because it will diagnose if I need to re-remember anything and then give me the things I need to know.

Desmos.com - a great graphing calculator for any browser, any operating system.  It graphs in color and makes graphing easy.  One warning - students become a bit dependent upon it, so make sure you help them with graphing calculators too because they can't use desmos on assessments or the SAT.

TI-Nspire Cas CX - the best graphing calculator I've ever used.  Menu based and document driven, it looks more like a computer than a calculator, graphs in color, and will do most basic algebra tasks for you if you know how to use it. 

For presentations, I like smart boards, smart tablets, chromecasts for students to cast to (with their chromebooks) and dual displays.  My room has a forward facing and rear facing projector, one of which has a smart board attached.  I'm hoping my donorschoose gets funded so that I can use a wacom tablet on the other one, to sort of emulate the smart board functionality without actually having a smart board attached.  I used to use the RM easiteach boards, which I felt were better technology than SMART boards, but for some reason they've been discontinued. 
They were sort of like this:
https://www.camcor.com/cat/iMMPad-SE-Wireless-Classroom-Tablet-RM-Easiteach-Mac-IMMPADSE.html

Anyhow, have a great day!

Mark

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Men in schools . . . why we need them and why they leave.

 Good morning, I watched a video this morning about issues affecting boys in the US.   https://youtu.be/Qi1oN1icAYc I realized, as one of the relatively rare male teachers in my schools, I might have been an asset to the boys in my classrooms.  However, there are many real reasons I chose to leave that profession, at least in its current incarnation in public schools.   Male teachers are encouraged to develop rapport, in the same way as female teachers.  However, when students try to give them a hug they have to back away and put their hands up, try to go for a handshake instead.  When we chaperone things, we have to clearly identify ourselves as such to keep people from trying to protect their children from us.  As a society, I think we've become so scared of pedophiles that we've stopped men from being able to interact in a positive way with youth, at least comfortably.  Every interaction is first measured by a, "could this be taken th...
Read more

The Rising Cost of Innumeracy

As a math teacher in Hartford for 14 years, I have heard the following phrase over and over.  "I'm just bad at math.  No one in my family can do it, I'm just never going to get it."  My response is always that of course they can, but it is a cultural problem that is solvable with a little help from the other adults in the students' lives. When I was at Bates thinking about philosophy, one of the things that interested me was John Locke's tabula rasa (blank slate) philosophy.  To paraphrase, he is saying that we are all born blank slates and we can all learn to do anything.  This is powerful stuff, especially as it applies to my students above.  If they are truly blank slates, I can help them write numeracy on their mind's chalkboard in sharpie.  To this end, I run a seminar every year on the first day of class to discuss whether or not the blank slate is a real thing.  Then, my socratic questions become mathematical.  For instance, "do ...
Read more

Nature (and why it needs to be reintroduced in schools)

 I think nature may have been my best teacher.   To be fair to all my human teachers, I have had some excellent ones, as well as mentors in the teaching profession and in life.  However, none of them is quite as extraordinary as the natural world around us.  If one pays attention, like Davinci, there's not much it cannot teach us or inspire us to do.  If one examines root structures, for instance, while weeding the garden, we might start to notice similarities between those and our lung brachii.  Fish and bugs have curves that are adapted to their survival, but also turn out to be great for hydrodynamics and all sorts of other things.   When I learn things from nature, the challenge is to describe these things to others, or use them for something that makes sense in my life.  But if we watch, and listen, we can learn.  
Read more