Charlotte Area Math Educators' Wiki - Recently Updated Pages

Mathematics Links

oceanicuk — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 04:25:35 CST

Links to various mathematics related links. A simple internet search on mathematics/lesson plans/teaching of grade approprate content returns a huge number of hits. The list below contains both links and comments on content found there. Please feel free to add links and provide comments.

Name

Comments

21st Century Learning: Education in the 21st century wiki

A community of educators embarking on a collaborative journey into the future of education, educational technologies and new curriculums in order to prepare our students to function in a competitive and rapidly changing global world.

Math Lessons and Math Tutors - MathLessons.com When the numbers don't add up.

Free Math Lessons classifieds in your local area, come and search or post.

BECTA: Leads the national drive to inspire and lead the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning.

It's BECTA's ambition to create a more exciting, rewarding and successful experience for learners of all ages and abilities enabling them to achieve their potential.

Convert-me: a collection of online conversion tools for weight, length, volume, etc

Looking for a conversion chart? You've found the right place. Here you can make online conversions (e.g. metric conversions) for many measurement systems.

Doing What Works (DWW): A website sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. DWW is dedicated to helping educators identify and make use of effective teaching practices.

Includes concepts and best practices for teaching varuous student populations.

ExploreLearning offers a catalog of over 400 modular, interactive simulations in math and science for teachers and students in grades 6-12.

Simulations, called Gizmos, are designed as supplemental curriculum materials that support state and national curriculum standards.

High School ACE: The Academic Homepage for High School Students

Review materials, topical help and online lessons targeted at high school mathematics students

HippoCampus: Provides access to high-quality, multimedia content on general education subjects free of charge. You can access the content at HippoCampus in a number of ways.

A wide range of flash based review lessons. Not a great source for intial learning, but a good place for review and pre-test problems.

THE Journal: Informing and educating K-12 senior-level district and school administrators, technologists, and tech-savvy educators within districts, schools, and classrooms to improve and advance the learning process through the use of technology.

Education journal with a focus on technology. A great resource.

JISC infoNet: A UK based national services portfolio and a range of programmes and projects.

Resources that can help you improve the support for, and quality of, learning and teaching in your institution. Our resources are freely available to institutions and individuals.

Math Blog portal: A directory to mathematics realted blogs.

Blogged posts are recently reviewed and ranked by readers.

Mathematics Illuminated -Annenberg Media's Mathematics Illuminated

Annenberg Media's Mathematics Illuminated is a 13-part multimedia learning resource for adult learners and high school teachers in math and other disciplines. The series explores major themes in the field of mathematics, from mankind's earliest study of prime numbers to the cutting edge mathematics used to reveal the shape of the universe.

math.com: The world of math online

A collection of tools, calculators, worksheets and understandable explanations, examples and more.

MathCast: An open source equation editor

Allows you to input mathematical equations. These equations can be used in written documents, webpages, and even databases. Makes a good pairing with onloine collab tools that do not support equation editing (most of them)

Mathforum: A community library of technology tools, lessons, activities, and support materials for teaching and learning mathematics.

Math Tools is a project of The Math Forum @ Drexel. The goal is to create a community digital library that supports the use and development of software for mathematics education.

Mathematics Museum : This website provides visual and written explanations of various aspects of mathematics.

The Museum is maintained in Japan and a couple of the sections are available in Japanese only.

GeoGebraWiki is a free pool of teaching materials for the dynamic mathematics software GeoGebra.

Everyone can contribute and upload materials! All contents of this pool may be used free of charge. This site contains lessons for K-12 students based on the GeoGebra application.

Mathematics Teaching Resource Wiki

A wiki for sharing resources for mathematics teaching. It is based in the UK but resources are free for all (and you can add to them).

Geometer's Sketchpad Resources

A list of resources for the Geometer's Sketchpad that posted to the OSAPAC Learning Objects Repository

The Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications (JOMA) is a publication of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). JOMA is the journal of theMathematical Sciences Digital Library(MathDL), for which MAA has received funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

All articles and other materials submitted to JOMA are peer-reviewed. JOMA publishes continuously as accepted materials are ready to be posted. See archives for a trove of applications and activities.

K12wiki: An example of a wiki being used as a class cooperative archive

An attempt to collect math based videos as a class assignement.

Learning tools for math teachers. Palm Beach County schools site

General, algebra, geometry, trig and calc tools and links.

The Math Forum - the leading online resource for improving math learning, teaching, and communication since 1992.

Check out the Resources and Tools links. Tools, lessons, online library and more. Check out Making Effective Use of the Math Fourm Resources

Maths Teaching Ideas: General Maths ideas and resources

This site contains freely accessible lesson ideas, activities and resources.

Online Productivity portal: Links to many classroom resources

Tucson United School District portal

Physlet® Physics: Interactive Illustrations, Explorations, and Problems for Introductory Physics

This site3 has lots of nifty simulations. All physics based, but great archive for visual simulations. The tools can be used to as examples for the mathematics 'underneath' them.

Calculator Help for Algebra - provides calculator help for Algebra objectives

This site offers PDF and video for a TI-84 calculator for College Algebra objectives.

slideshare.net: A vast site containing many presentation decks.

Sortable archive of a wdie variety of chart decks.

Maths Online: Links to tools and resources for mathematics distance learning.

Includes a very comprehensvie list of useful mathematics sites.

Resources for Arkansas Mathematics Teachers: A set of online resources for K-12

Mathematics portal compiled a classroom teacher. The intent is to provide resources aligned to Arkansas Standards, but all teachers can benefit from these resources

Home page of Stephen Downes. A portal toonline learning, content syndication, and new media.

Exceptional web site containing presentations, publications and discussions around online learning

TeacherTube: Streaming educational video clips.

This link is set to search videos for high school math.

TeachersTV: Thousands of education programmes on TV and online

UK television programs offered as streaming vidoe. Covers various disciplines. Some excellent mathematics related ones.

App4Math: TheZoom Math Starter Edition.App4Math is a free App able to do most of the mathematical and scientific functions your calculator already does.

Zoom Math Starter Edition (App4Math) is pre-installed on all TI-84 Plus Silver Edition graphing calculators. All Zoom Math Apps, including this one, work on the TI-83 Plus, TI-84 Plus, TI-84 Plus Silver Edition and TI-Nspire with the 84 Plus keypad installed. Helps make using a graphing calculator more inituitive.

The Mathematical Atlas

In-depth catalog of every field of mathematics; includes history, real world applications, sub-fields, recommended textbooks, tutorials, sources, tables and software, and more.

Equation Editor

Generates beautiful mathematical equations using the LaTex syntax (with optional buttons to add symbols). Equations created are generated to .png image files which can then be downloaded or uploaded to a site.

Mathematics Fun

vsl55 — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:42:15 CDT

This is a place to share fun videos, jokes, cartoons, or anything else that gets our spirits up related to mathematics. If we can't have fun and laugh at ourselves a little, what are we doing wrong?

Problem of the day: Link to a "mathematics problem of the day".

Portal to a list of problem for the day/week/month: Elementary through High school level.

Drexel University's Problems of the week

The Eyeballing Game: A fun exercise in visual estimation

Theorem of the Day:Each day offers a different theorem (or lemma, law, formula or identity)

Math Jokes: A collection of mathematical folklore targeted at mathematicians and students.

Wolfram Demonstration Projects. Puzzles
Wolfram Demonstration Projects. Recreations
Wolfram Demonstration Projects. Puzzles and Recreations: Advanced

Glossary of mathematical Mistakes: A list of mathematical mistakes made over and over by advertisers, the media, reporters, politicians, activists, and in general many non-math people. These come from many sources, which will appear in parenthesis.

Math.com Games: A selection of online math based puzzles and games.

MAA MinuteMath: Exercise your mind daily with a problem from the AMC-8, AMC-10, or AMC-12, provided by MAA's American Mathematics Competitions. Interactive problem a day with solution.

A few innovative homework papers

Magic Cube GeneratorDwane H. Campbell and Keith A. Campbell focus primarily on a set of 8 by 8 by 8 magic cubes that are often called perfect magic cubes of order 8, Nasik magic cubes of order 8, or order-8 pan-2,3-agonal magic cubes. There are 3,295,497,267,707,904,000 (almost 3.3 quintillion) visually different magic cubes described in this set. All cubes in the set have over 10,000 different ways to sum to the magic constant. Sections of their site:

Overview - History, Basic Concepts, Statistics
Magic Cube
Magic Hypercubes
Downloads
References
Contact

NCTM Math Notes: Fun and instructive resources for teachers and teacher educators at grades 5-10. Games, thinking exercises and more - all with mathematics underpinnings.

Puzzle-maker.com: Create crossword or word search puzzles on any topic for free.

Macalester College Problem of the Week:

Mathematics Applications

vsl55 — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:49:06 CDT

The internet provides many free online mathematics applications. These tools are in various states of maturity. Some offer good support; others are 'as-is'.

Geometry and Algebra

Name and Description	More Information
Animoto: Web based application that can be used to create videos made from your images.	Animoto turns your images and soundtrack into stunning music videos in minutes. Free to sign up. If you’ve got pics, you’re ready to go!
Cinderella Interactive Geometry Software: Geometry on the desktop and the web. Version 1.4 is free.	Easily create startling geometric constructions! Cinderella lets you create and manipulate visualizations in an intuitive, yet powerful way. Using Java® technologies, constructions are seamlessly exported to the WWW. Get Cinderella 1.4 for free now!
eCalc : Basic and a Scientific online calculators.	eCalc is a free online calculator that supports many advanced features including unit conversion, equation solving, and even complex-number math. The calculator is designed to work directly in your browser and requires no special plug-ins.
GeoGebra is a free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for schools that joins geometry, algebra and calculus.	Truly remakable geo sketchpad. Easily installed; very powerful. Fractions, algebra, geometry and basic calc. Includes an attendent wiki containing lessons and activities. Get the code
Long Division calculator	Online long division calculator. Handles expression in one variable and shows entire process.
MathematicaPlayer has the full Mathematica engine embedded right there--ready to make documents come alive or to power applets.	Because Player-interactive documents are so easy to make using Mathematica 6 technology, thousands of these are already freely available at The Wolfram Demonstrations Project--with more supplied each day by researchers, educators, students, and professionals.
mathfest Online calculators: A portal to several online numerical calulators	Nice calculators - but some of the links are dead.
Maths Online: A portal into prepared links to more than sixty online tools for every day purposes, and some hints where you find more.	Each tool is started in its own browser window.
Seeing Math: Interactive software tools to clarify key mathematical ideas in middle and high school mathematics. Each interactive provides a real-time connection between representations of the mathematics (symbolic, graphical, etc.), so that changes in one representation instantly cause changes in the other.	Many interesting Java applet tools. Free and easily run from most browsers.
National Library of Virtual Manipulatives: Free applet 'virtual' manipluatives for grades K-12	Wide range of instructive, fun mathematics manipulatives
Shodor Interactivate: A set of free, online courseware for exploration in science and mathematics. It is comprised of activities, lessons, and discussions.	Another set of jave based applet tools. Free and easily run from most browsers.
TILP: Leading linking program that allows you to send/receive files from your Texas Instruments Graphing Calculator	Standalone tool for your TI advanced calculators
WWW interactive multipurpose calculators and tools. Forty two online tools.	Numbers, functions, matrices, curves, surfaces, etc
WolframAplha: This new search tool includes the ability to solve many types of Mathematical problems	An ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram\|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.

Wikis and File Sharing Tools

vsl55 — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:59:14 CDT

The internet provides many free online wikis, web hosting sites and other collaborative tools. These tools are in various states of maturity. Some offer good support; others are 'as-is'.

Wikis and Collaboration Tools

Name and Description	More Information
21Classes: Create a virtual classroom and BlogPortal.	Instant use, hosted and free blogs.
Blogger: A free, easy-to-use blogging tool.	Blogs can be integrated into your class to promote student reflection, exchange of ideas and/or demonstration of key concepts.
CollegeBrain: Enables course instructors to consolidate, view, and manage their course administration at one source with a free, easy-to-use service	Adhere to 508 Accessibility and are DMCA, FERPA, and Safe Harbor Standards compliant.Privacy is protected and no ads.
del.ici.ous :A social bookmarks manager. Using bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them.	The primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere. Sharing bookmarked sites is supported. See an intro about social bookmarking
Diigo: A browser add-on that can improve research productivity. Instead of just bookmarking, you can highlight portions of web pages that are of particular interest to you.	Diigo highlights and sticky notes are persistent in the sense that whenever you return to the original web page, you will see your highlights and sticky notes superimposed on the original page. See a video intro to diigo
Ekiga (formely known as GnomeMeeting). An open source VoIP and video conferencing application for GNOME.	Pure open source working alternative to Skype.
Elgg : An open source application for rolling out a social network. It provides all the components of a social networking site	Elgg allows you to take full advantage of the power of social technology with elegant, flexible solutions for organisations, groups and individuals.
FeedDemon: A popular Windows RSS reader.	Not wild about Windoz, but a good feed reader.
Fliggo: Create your own video site.	Build a video blog, the next YouTube or just a private place to share videos. With Fliggo, you can control who can join, upload, comment, or put a password on your entire site.
gliffy - Turn your ideas into pictures. Online, web based shapes drawing tool	Basic's shape libraries lets you create and share diagrams.
HotChalk - A learning environment for K-12 teachers, students and parents that includes a learning management system (LMS), a rich library of teacher-contributed lesson plans, premium digital content like NBC News video, and professional development for teachers in a Web-based environment.	Available through any Internet browser, the HotChalk Learning Environment is an easy to use system and brings teachers, students and parents together to improve education.
JumpBox Wikis: Jumpbox offers five different virtualized 'wikis in a box'	Take your pick from Enterprise wiki, PmWiki, DokuWiki, TikiWiki or MediaWiki. Each is available as adrop in virtualized machine.
MediaFire: A free file hosting service for businesses, professionals, and individuals to share files and images with others	File hosting, file sharing made easy. Read More
Moodle - Course management system. Create your own or perhaps starts with the Moodle Jumpbox	Allows educators to create quality online courses.
Sage: Firefox RSS plugin. Makes followingnews feeds easy	Follow RSS feeds in a Firefox browser side panel. See RSS HowTo for details.
Sakai : An online Collaboration and Learning Environment. Many users of Sakai deploy it to support teaching and learning, ad hoc group collaboration, support for portfolios and research collaboration.	Sakai is a free and open source product that is built and maintained by the Sakai community. Java based
Scribd: Store documents - doc, ppt, pdf, xls, etc and share them with others. You can also embed a document in your blog or web page.	Think of scribd as youtube foe documents. Not well organized, but a great repository. Supports groups
SiteBar is a Web browser bookmark synchronization solution.One feature that sets SiteBar apart from many others is the ability to set up your own bookmark server, which keeps the whole system under your control.While SiteBar is useful for individuals, it is even more useful for corporate or other groups	You can also use SiteBar through a third-party server that offers membership levels ranging from a free, ad-supported "basic" level up to an "admin" level that costs 9.99 Euros (about $15.50) per month. While SiteBar is useful for individuals, it is even more useful for corporate or other groups
Sketchcast: A free, web-basedonline white board. Recorddrawings, diagrams or writing on the digital white board. Overdub with audio	Sketchcastprovides you with a url thatplugs into Blackboard.
Skype : Allows users to make telephone calls over the internet to other Skype users free of charge, or to landlines and cell phones for a fee.	Provides free Skype to Skype calls and supports conferencing calls for up to 10 participants.
SlideShare: The world's largest community for sharing presentations on the web.	Share presentation decks for free. Beta open. Slick features
SlideRocket: An impressive set of tools for creating, distributing, sharing and collaborating on presentations	Beta open. Very slick features. Create and share presentations, slides and other content. Take the online tour and then grab your free beta account
TalkAndWrite Whiteboard for Skype Done by Mathematician for on-line Math tutoring. Skype Certified.	Watch the video “First use”
TiddlyWiki: A complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server.	TiddlyWiki is published under an OpenSourceLicense and maintained by a busy Community of independent developers.
TinyRSS: Internet Explorer RSS plugin. Makes followingnews feeds easy	Follow RSS feeds in an IE browser side panel. SeeRSS HowTo for details.
TokBox: Tokbox is a free service that lets you talk with your friends over live video.	Video chat and video message with friends and family for free. All you need is a webcam and a browser.
VNC: RealVNC provides remote control software which lets you see and interact with desktop applications across any network.	A graphical desktop sharing system transmits the keyboard and mouse events from one computer to another, relaying the graphical screen updates over a network. Supports virtual sharing.
VoiceThread:A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways	Watch and listen to an intro tovoicethread
ed.VoiceThread:A web-based collaborative network that is simple, powerful and safe. This community is specifically designed for K-12 educators and students. This is a secure site designed for K-12 students and teachers.	Watch and listen to an intro to the educationvoicethread How to obtain access to ed.voicethread
xvdicap: A small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display	Xvidcap is a tool that can capture movement on an X11 display. It works in two distinct modes: It can capture to single frames (like a number of jpeg images) or it can encode the captured frames to a video on-line. See How to Install xvidcap on Ubuntu
WeblogMatrix: A portal designed to help you decide which weblog is the best for your needs.	Compare the features of all those weblog tools you heard of. You can compare, choose and discuss the various Weblogs and their features.
Weebly: A free web hosting site. Create your own website.	Simple to use. Fairly sizable content.
Wetpaint :Free wiki websites available to anyone and easy to use. Wetpaint hosts Wikis In Education - a portal to wetpaint wikis with an education focus	Simple, easy to learn, easy to use wiki. This wiki is powered by wetpaint.
Wikispaces: A free wiki for K-12 educators	Exclusively for K-12 educational use. K-12 means kindergarten through secondary school. It is available worldwide to teachers, students, and educators.
Wordpress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.WordPress is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything.You can also use the Wordpress Jumpbox (virtualized blog	There is also a service called WordPress.com which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress-based blog in seconds, but varies in several ways and is less flexible than the WordPress you download and install yourself.
Zoho - Zoho is a suite of web services offered by AdventNet.	The different web services can be accessed with just a browser & an internet connection.

Links to Explore More

vsl55 — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 05:48:08 CDT

This is just a place to drop links that look like they may be worth exploring more deeply.

http://www.fi.ncsu.edu/feature/fizz-a-new-way-to-help-schools-teach-through-technology
http://www.shell-fu.org/
http://www.mindomo.com/view?m=38cc4f6a467acbfde4be796e68399450
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/12/12/teamviewer-lets-pcs-and-macs-share-desktops/
http://dougpete.pbwiki.com/Eight+Weeks+To+Web+2
http://dougpete.pbwiki.com/FrontPage
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=56405
http://www.linux-magazine.com/online/news/ecofont_perforated_font_saves_ink
http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/12/31/cynin-more-open-source-group-collaboration/
http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/01/09/mixedink-online-collaborative-writing/
http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/01/23/prism-a-flexible-free-tool-for-working-with-video/
http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/01/26/best-tech-videos-aggregates-categorized-tech-tutorials/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_build_a_social_media_cheat_sheet.php
http://terry-freedman.org.uk/artman/publish/article_1455.php
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/23898/
http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=56922&page=2
http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
http://www.techlearning.com/article/15772
http://tinyurl.com/Algebra2TutoringRoom
http://www.flvs.net/students_parents/VSACourseAvailability.php
http://pewresearch.org/interactive/
http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/03/12/file-sharing-app-dropio-adds-nifty-real-time-features/
http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2417
http://www.thejournal.com/articles/24297/
http://www.mathvids.com/
http://webworkerdaily.com/2009/06/04/no-fuss-video-conferencing-using-tinychat/
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39663088,00.htm
http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/et/2009/07/ivy-league-on-your-laptop-maris-beck.html

Whiteboard And Collaboration Tools

vsl55 — Thu, 21 May 2009 06:21:44 CDT

The internet provides many free online whiteboard and conferencing tools. These tools are in various states of maturity. Some offer good support; others are 'as-is'.

A 'vendor-independent' portal ranking both commerical and free online collaboration tools canbe found at Survey of Online meeting Tools.

Whiteboard and Online Collaboration

Name and Description	More Information
Brio is a web meeting service designed for small collaborative meetings for individual professionals and small businesses.	Built on Adobe's Flash platform, Brio operates inside most popular web browsers. Works well with Windoz. Linux based browser can view other's shared screen,but cannot share its own screenWorks well from a Windoz VMware image.
Bluehouse: "Bluehouse" is the place where businesses come to get work done. Whether you need to prepare for tomorrow's meeting, are ready to host one today or want to collect feedback from yesterday's call.	IBM offering. Low end edition includes several free and useful options.
Campfire: A web-based group chat tool that lets you set up password-protected chat rooms in just seconds. Invite a client, colleague, or vendor to chat, collaborate, and make decisions. Link to a room on your intranet for internal communications.	Low end allows 4 free users. A nice fully featured chat tool.
Dabbleboard : A whiteboard application that 'smoothes' out shapes drarn using a mouse. Handy, simple to use.	Features annotation by typing anywhere, a freehand drawing mode to let you avoid the cleaning up, and the ability to insert images.
Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees.	ReadDimdim Open Source is a bright-bright solution for Web conferencing DimDim and Zimbra look to be merging. See related article
Elluminate vRoom: Real-time collaboration with up to three participants using interactive features. Whiteboard, chat. Excpetional virtual classroom. Java based so it runs 'anywhere'	Very full featured virtual classroom. vRoom is the free low end. Several levels of commercial prodcut is available. This is a polished and well though out productr.
GoogleVoice: Voice and video chat for Gmail	With a Webcam and a Web browser plug-in, users can start video chats with other Gmail users,
IBM Sametime Unyte: The IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte services add a visual element to any instant message, chat or voice call. Conferencing has never been easier or more accessible for users of all skill levels. Invite friends or colleagues to share your desk top or view documents online together - anytime, anywhere. The Lotus Sametime Unyte services are quick to install, easy-to-use and won't break your budget.	Free and low cost versions of collaborative tools. No vioce, but otherwise a free 1 to 1 workspace requiring nothing but a browser.
Scriblink : A free digital whiteboard that users can share online in real-time. Includes drawing tools.	Features, Limitations and Links
ShowDocument: Free File Sharing and Net Meeting Service	A free Flash-based web app that provides a robust, no-hassle way to get near-instant feedback or collaboration on a document, with no signup or downloads required.
Stixy :A limited funtction, free online whiteboard collaboration tool. Offers users the ability to share content in real time.	Features, Limitations and Links
TalkAndWrite Simulates the interaction of up 10 users,working side by side on any common document. Done by Mathematician for on-line Math tutoring. Skype Certified	See how to use (First use video) Voice via Skype Nice tool, but free version allows only 10 minute sessions.
vYew : Excellent online collaboration and web conferencing service.Host live conferences and work collaboratively on content asynchronously over time, anytime	Features, Limitations and Links
Ustream.TV is the live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.	Anyone can become a broadcaster by creating their own channel on Ustream or by broadcasting through their own site, empowering them to engage with their audience and further build their brand. Ustream's one-to-many live interactive video encourages broadcast-to-viewer and viewer-to-viewer interaction, empowering a much more engaging experience for everyone involved.
Wiggio: A free, online toolkit that makes it easy to work in groups. You can use wiggio's functionalities to manage all your groups and projects from this one website.	Includes calendar, polls, messaging, etc. A great tool for group coordination.
Wiziq: Online Virtual Classroom on WiZiQ is a free alternative to expensive conferencing tools selling as online teaching/learning software. No screen sharing, but includes math sybols and a full function whiteboard.	Demo video of virtual classroom feature Requires no download or installation. Requires Windoz operating system. I have had little success making wiziq do all the things I see other folks make it do.
Yugma is an easy-to-use web conferencing service that allows users to host or attend online meetings on Windows, Mac and Linux (future direction) computers.	Yugma is quick to download. Go from initial download to hosting a session within a matter of minutes. Yugma is a lightweight application that starts up quickly, and takes up almost no system resources on your computer.
Yuuguu: Application screen sharing or Web Share, share control of your screen and work together in real time over the web. YuuGuu has been integrated with Skype	Windows, Mac and Linux systems, we made the Yuuguu application work with older system versions for maximum availability. Screen sharing, instant messaging and the ability to work on the same document together in real time is free. A low cost audio conferencing feature is available. This is an exceptional tool!

Announcements and Education News

vsl55 — Tue, 19 May 2009 05:52:22 CDT

YuuGuu and Skype are now integrated. http://www.yuuguu.com/features/skype-integration	News - Use Browser back button to return If you want to add this news feed to your RSS reader, the URL is http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=SKUtuBzc3BGIP5hsn0artA&_render=rss

AP Statistics

cnorthrup — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:46:07 CDT

Probability Solutions
Many problems assigned in middle and high school mathematics courses end up being variations on theme. Basically, the problems are in the same form and are solved the same way, but they are presented with different inputs. This page contains links to step by step solutions for probability and statistics problems.

Find the example that:

Fits your needs
Review the presentation
Decide what inputs are required
Understand thesteps required to solve the specific problem type
Use your newfound understanding to solve your specific problem

Basic Probability

Basic probability - combination permutation

A Webquest called "Got Milk" : High School level investigation into the price of milk over the last 40 years. Uses Statistics and an inflation calculator.

Algebra Solutions

vsl55 — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:28:50 CDT

Many problems assigned in middle and high school algebra courses end up being variations on theme. Basically, the problems are in the same form and are solved the same way, but they are presented with different inputs. This page contains links to step by step solutions for many typical algebra problems.

Find the example that:

Fits your needs
Review the presentation
Decide what inputs are require
Understand thesteps required to solve the specific problem type
Use your newfound understanding to solve your specific problem

Factoring algebraic expressions

Theorem of alebgra

Fundamental theorem of algebra

Problems involving lines and slopes

Simple Equations and Linear Equations

Square Roots

Simplifying integer square roots - video

Quadratic Equations

Fractions / rational expressions

Simplfying Fractions and rational expressions using Mulitplication and division

Exponential Growth/Decay

Solving exponential decay - video

Compound Interest - video

Compound Interest examples - video
Continuous compounding example - video

Complex Numbers - video

Introduction to complex numbers and operation on complex numbers - video

8th Grade Mathematics

vsl55 — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 07:06:46 CST

Exponents and Scientific Notation - Video lesson on exponents and converting numers to/from scientific notation/standard form.

What is a wiki and why do I care

vsl55 — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 06:54:28 CST

Wikis are a collaborative tool. Basically, they are websites that allow the users of that site to view, add and maintain the contents of the site. This is a new age for education and wikis are a leading part of the shift to a digital classroom. For a quick introduction into why your should care, see Did You Know and Turning On the Lights.

From a math educator's perspective, you might want to take a peek at This Web2.0 wiki too

Then take a quick look at how wikis change the way information and collaboration work. See Wiki's in Plain English

So, what is a wiki is and how can teachers can effectively use them? A quick introduction to wikis is shown below.

How do teachers use wikis? Here are some examples.

If, after getting acquainted with wiki technology, you envision ways to incorporate wikis into your classroom, you can easily start you own wiki. Read our Wiki HowTo.

Here a link to a site dedicated to education wikis - what they are, how folks are using them. Includes many examples.

For a though provoking idea on using wiki's as dynamic texts, read Wikitexts: Learning Better by Writing the Book

Tutorials and Guides on using wikis in education.

Office Suite, Edit Applications, Screen Capture and More

vsl55 — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:31:07 CST

here are many free tools avialable for end users. Many of these tools rival the functionality of expensive applications offered commercially.

This is by no means a complete list. It's just a list of the more familiar ones.

Office Suites

OpenOffice : A complete office suite including word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor. Contains most of the functionality in the Microsoft Office suite. Works for Linux and windows.

Math: The OpenOffice.org suite's equation editor. The markup language is similar to LaTeX, the de facto standard for creating scientific and technical documents. Once you become proficient in ooMath, you can produce accurately marked-up equations for lab reports and papers.

Lotus Symphony: Lotus Symphony was voted office productivity software product of the year for 2008 by Datamation Magazine readers. In what can only be described as an upset, relative newcomer, Lotus Symphony, beat out Microsoft Office, OpenOffice 2.3.1, ThinkFree Office and other nominees.

Image Editing and Screen Capture

Audacity: A free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

Record live audio.
Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
And more! See the complete list of features.

Capture Fox Movie: A Firefox add-on and a handy tool to create tutorials about a software, a web site or anything that can be displayed on your computer. It records your screen frame by frame. You can also record your voice.

Fotoxx:Fotoxx is a free open-source Linux program for improving image files made with a digital camera.The GUI is available in English, German, Spanish, and French. See thissimple introductory artcle on Fotoxx features

GIMP:GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.

Inkscape: An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development. Versions for Linux, Mac and Windows. See these videos on how to use various features of Inkscape.

Jing: Always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere. Free. But only Windows and Mac

jUploadr is a cross platform, cross-site Photo uploader. Currently it runs on Windows Linux and OS X and supports both Flickr and Zooomr. It allows you to set all properties of a photo before you upload it. It also supports batch editing, so you can make short work of uploading a bunch of files.

Keepvid A free tool that allows you to capture video from any webpage and create a video file that you can download to keep. Save as Flash file or a more user friendly MP4 file. Great tool for collecting streaming video and keeping it locally (in case the site is blocked inside your school network)

NVU: A Web Authoring System for Linux desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Nvu (which stands for "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Smushit : A service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.

Image and Video Hosts and Editors wiki page: A portal into a list of image and video tools

Miscellaneous

A running commentary on Open Source (free) tools for both Linux and Windoz. Open source projects you should get to know

Blabberize : Allows you to upload a photo, add sound, and animate the mouth so it looks as though the subject is talking. It’s best to upload a picture (jpg, gif, png, or bitmap) in which the subject is facing forward. Nothing special, but can be fun

CutePDF: Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard for the secure and reliable distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world. CutePDF Writer (formerly CutePDF Printer) is the free version of commercial PDF creation software. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a "printer subsystem". This enables virtually any Windows application (must be able to print) to create professional quality PDF documents - with just a push of a button!

PrintWhatYouLike is a free web page editor that gives you control of how web pages look when printed. Ever print a web page only to find your printout is full of ads, empty space and other junk you don't want? No need to anymore.

Scribus: An open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Subsonic is a free, Web-based media streamer that lets you -- and your friends -- access your music collection over the Internet. Subsonic can handle large music collections, running into the thousands of CDs. It also works with video; in fact, it can let you remotely access any format that can be streamed over a standard HTTP connection. If needed, Subsonic will convert your collection to a streaming format on the fly, taking into account the available bandwidth. You can use any browser and media player combination to listen to your music; I went for Firefox and RealPlayer, but other combinations are equally valid.

tinyurl is an online utility that converts a long, cumbersome URL into a nice small one. Sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then tinyurl is for you..

Lessons & Activities

vsl55 — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:11:56 CST

This is a page where we can share math lessons and activities that we've found to be effective for our students. If you need something for next week or next semester, just ask,Or if you've come across something that you're really excited about, do share. Even though we always have to align them to fit our classroom and student's particular needs, there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

There are LOTS of sites out there that offer lesson plans, but these are tailored to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study!

CIESE Collaborative Projects A series of collaborative projects that use the Internet's potential to reach peers and experts around the world. Each project has a brief description, and links to the NCTM standards and Nation Science Standards it supports.

Puzzles and Problems: A list of math problem/puzzle sites for teachers. Covers various mathematics disciplines.

Teach Area and Perimeter Using Google Earth - A short video on how to get Google Earth and some ways you can use it to help you teach mathematics.

NutshellMath: Fifty-three excellent mathematics instructional videos covering a variety of middle and high school mathematics topics.

Mathematical recreations: puzzles and games.

The Futures Channel :The Futures Channel offers teachers a variety of free online movie clips and related lesson plans about real-world applications of mathematics and science.

The OSAPAC Committee (Ontario Software Acquisition Program Advisory Committee) is composed of English and French representatives from across the province who advise the Ministry of Education on the acquisition of provincial licenses for publicly funded schools in Ontario. Ready made lessons, activities and more.

Where on the Web do you go for free education and training materials? A project called Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF) has created a site where educators and students can upload and download courseware without charge, or create courseware collaboratively. It maintains free-as-in-freedom content, and is intended for courses on free/libre software.

HowTo

vsl55 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:28:45 CST

A little help up the learning curve is a good thing, We've included some pages to help jumpstart your use of collaboartive tools and technologies. Use the Navigation menu to see the list of HowTo documents. If you don't find what you're looking for consider:

Adding a page to cover the topic
Adding a thread to this page with specifics about what you are trying to do.

How to create a Podcast- Part 1 and How to create a Podcast - Part 2
How to use Voicethread
How to insert a Wetpaint Custom widget
How to setup your own wiki
How to setup an RSS plugin
How to add music and narration to a powerpoint presentation and Using Sounds in powerpoint
How to setup xvidcap on a R61i running Ubuntu
How to create desktop videos from Ubuntu
How to install Lotus Symphony on Ubuntu
How to add a solution from algebra.com
How to use links to GoogleDocs to provide feedback to your students
How to Use Prism tobring web applications to the desktop
How to install VirtualBox into Ubuntu
How to capture streaming video locally

How to capture streaming video for local playback

vsl55 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:27:53 CST

The info below was pulled from this article. I think the info is too good to get lost, so if the link is broken, the gist is copied below.

YouTube has a rather frivolous reputation, the sort of site you might visit to see a video of snowboarding hamsters or jetpacking gerbils. It wasn’t until I started re-learning the guitar, learning to play the piano too and sight reading sheet music that I began to realize that YouTube was a great source of online tutorials. The quality varies from the execrable to the sublime, but I found sufficient quality material to start wondering how I might best use YouTube to organize my digital music lessons. As a committed GNU/Linux user I wondered how to make the most of my distro’s ability to manage my viewing and download experience. Unixland is a free country full of choice and here are the choicest tips, tools, tricks and applications to get the best out of YouTube. Obviously the premier requirement for viewing YouTube videos is to have Flash installed. Many distros will come with it pre-installed. If not, grab it from your distro’s repositories. That is the easiest route. If it is not available there, then install it from the prompt you will get when you try to view a video. This will take you to the official Adobe site for downloading Flash. This does not always work. If not try the manual install of the compressed tarball. cd to t he directory where you downloaded it and type in a console tar -xzvf install_flash_player*linux.tar.gz and install it with install_flash_player*linux and (as root) copy flash to your browser’s plugin directory with cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/firefox-3*/plugins/. This should work with other browsers as well as Firefox. You may need to restart your browser to get Flash up and running and in the case of Konqueror it will be necessary to use the configuration menu to scan for new plugins.Assuming that Flash has been pre-installed (or downloaded, installed) and is working, downloading and saving Youtube videos doesn’t actually require you to do anything too fancy. Any enabled browser will do. This tip exploits the fact that as you are watching a streaming YouTube video it is being “saved”. Where? In your /tmp directory. Regardless of what browser you are using to view a video, it will be saved to that directory. Using your favourite file manager, navigate to it. It will be easily recognizable as it will have a file name like Flash312N4Er, to take a random example. You can right click it and play it in any flash-enabled media player (Kaffeine, Movieplayer, Kplayer etc). As you might guess, as the file is in the /tmp directory it will be lost once your computer reboots so if you want to save it just drag and drop it into the directory of choice and it will be there when you reboot. Renaming it might be a good idea too! Yes , it really is that simple and will work with any of the main browsers, except Dillo and its ilk. The sheer audacity of it This is the simplest method to download and save videos. Sometimes though, you may want the embedded MP3 music track in a video to save out to your removable media player. Enter Audacity, a versatile piece of software to encode and record audio. Many distros include it, but if yours isn’t one of them then it’s usually only an apt-get, yum or urpmi away. It isn’t a glamour puss but it does the job, and if you want to set your parameters viz recording levels and audio codecs, Audacity gives you a lot. A word of warning though. If you fire up any application which uses the sound card and then start Audacity it will start but not before it spits out an error message that it cannot access your sound card and will not be able to record anything. So, start Audacity first, minimize it and then open your media player and tee up the flash video. Once you have set Audacity to your taste and preferences, start the video and hit the record button and Audacity will strip out the music track for you. When the video has finished stop recording and export the resulting ripped file as either a wav, ogg, mp3 or flac files. (If you are using the latest beta version—1.3.6—then you will also have the ability to encode in a wider range of file formats: WMA, M4A and AC3 as Audacity now supports FFmpeg. If not already installed it will need to be sourced separately in your distro repositories. FFmpeg is well worth having anyway as it is a powerful command-line tool in its own right for video/audio conversion that provides the heavy lifting for well-known media players like MPlayer, MEncoder and VLC). YouTube and KDE service menus This, as they say in my part of the world, is the long way round the houses but at least it has the virtue of easily-available software that comes as standard with most version of GNU/Linux. It doesn’t give you much granularity but it works. If you are using KDE/Konqueror, things start to get interesting when service menus hove into view. I wrote about these little gems back in the summer when considering just how much you could do from within the confines of Konqueror. Service menus really do extend Konqueror’s capabilities massively and there are two particularly relevant to YouTube. They directly download videos in a variety of file formats and allows extraction to various audio codecs. The ability to directly download a YouTube video by simply selecting this function from the right context menu (even when Flash is not working in Konqueror) is a godsend for anyone who wants life on easy street. The service menu for Get YouTube Video can be downloaded at the KDE apps site. Copy and paste one or other of the two sets of install instructions (the second one worked for me) and the menus will be added. Now, head over to Youtube and enter a search term. Even without trying to open a full video for viewing, just right click on any video title in the resultant list and Konqueror will offer you a number of tasty options:

Now you have a choices to download in either .flv or .mp4 format and their four sub menus allowing encoding and playback in various formats. MPeg-4 is supported by all the big hitters of free software, including Amarok, Banshee, MPlayer, Rhythmbox, Songbird, VLS and Xine and renders good-quality video. The second service menu is one which follows on from the first one. Once you have downloaded your YouTube video you may want to extract the audio stream if the video is of a musical nature. Install Audiokonverter and a simple right click will offer to extract the audio stream to Ogg, MP3, AAC, MP4 and Flac formats (providing you have the file formats installed). In the same vein, if you just want a simple, non interactive YouTube downloader for Konqueror’s context menu without options then install Clive and follow it up with the clive download Video KDE service menu. YouTube and Firefox What if you don’t have or use Konqueror (or Dolphin)? Firefox, as you might expect, has an addon to fill the gap. YouPlayer. Grab the addon at the official site and it will add a a small icon at the bottom right of the browser. Clicking on it will open a sidebar. You can now drag a YouTube video onto the bottom pane and elect to play it in the embedded player in the top pane or download it. Ditto for Google Videos. You can, incidentally, use this addon as a scratch bookmark tool. Just drag a tab to the bottom pane and it’s bookmarked. The other addon you need to complete the YouTube experience in Firefox is DownloadHelper. Once installed the inevitable right context menu offers the user options to download a YouTube video; The addon Preferences has seven tabs, the two most important being the YouTube and conversion tabs. The first allows you to configure how downloads are handled in terms of file names, detecting and using highest video quality and the conversion tab is the real meat here. It contains a link to an external application to convert videos. If you you have FFmpeg installed you should be good to go. The choice of codecs is substantial and you can configure thing so that you can enable automatic conversion, download in default Flash video or manually convert after download. DownloadHelper goes further: if you want to monitor YouTube (and other sites) for video updates on specific subjects you can downlaod the subtile extension either from the DownloadHelper menu in Tools (install) which will take you to the addon page or go to it directly. Once installed all you need to do is to link to the DownloadHelper page and follow the tutorial to set up a toolbar button which you can configure to monitor YouTube and other video sites for new video alerts according to the chosen subjects. For really powerful audio/video controls however the Media Converter addon is hard to beat if you want GUI click and point simplicity. Once installed this extension will add itself to the right-context menu; when you select a Youtube video you now have the option to convert and download it by way of a point and click wizard which offers a cornucopia of options to set video types, audio streams, bitrates, resolution and frames. If you prefer, you can go to the Media Converter homepage to search Youtube remotely in “portal mode”. The default is to convert a video directly from various portals:Download in Firefox (and other browsers) without addons Provided Firefox has Flash installed and Javascript enabled the Ckuik website not only is feature packed but also allows you to download Youtube videos and save them to your hard drive (just hover your mouse over the video and all the options will pop up). There are other impressive features on this site but I won’t spoil them by blabbing. See for yourself. This site is not GNU/Linux specific but so different that I thought I ought to include it. In a similar vein, sans download capability, is YouTube Fast Search. Well worth a visit. Both sites exploit YouTube’s API. Enjoy. Stand alone GUIs Using your browser is fine, but what about media players or dedicated software for Youtube? Fortunately, there is a trend towards integrating internet backends to media players and other standalone software. Here is a thumbnail overview of the pick of the bunch.

Totem

Gnome users will be familiar with Totem Most dependencies involve Python and gstreamer-plugins-bad 0.10.6. Better still, if you do not have Flash installed you can still find and view YouTube videos as Totem uses the Youtube API. However, you will still need to activate the plugin from Totem’s Edit menu. Once done, enable the sidebar from the View menu and you are set to browse Youtube and view. The quality of Youtube videos has improved since the arrival of the H264 format. If your distro repositories lack this plugin, one is available in a deb. binary for Ubuntu Hardy or a compressed tarball. Using Totem instead of firing up relative memory and RAM hogs like Firefox and Opera makes sense, to say nothing of the improved security profile. When Totem can view and save/convert Youtube videos it will really come into its own. For the haters of binary blobs like Flash player, the knowledge that using Totem with that plugin will bypass proprietary software and Adobe’s attempt to add DRM restrictions to Flash will be deeply satisfying.

Miro

Formerly Democracy Player, Miro plays a plethora of formats and even if you do not want to view and save YouTube videos the feature set is so extensive that it is worth installing in its own right and you will find a version for all the main distros. You can search, download and save from YouTube (though Miro will automatically delete after five days unless you set the options to save permanently). Miro will allow you to view the videos in full screen and in HD too—if or when YouTube ever support that format. Miro is a must for audio visual fanatics.

Elltube

Elltube is an elegant, simple no nonsense GUI for downloading and converting Youtube videos. Version 0.3 has just been released. The only dependencies are PyQt4 > 4.0 and Python > 2.4 and if you want conversion facilities, FFmpeg. It supports numerous codecs: AVI, MPEG, MP4, MP3, WAV. Unlike Totem, Elltube does not have a specific search facility. It requires the user to paste a YouTube URL. The good news is that to do this doesn’t even require Elltube to be running at all. Just browse YouTube (even with a browser not Flash enabled), right click and select copy link address. You will be pleasantly surprised when you launch Elltube. That link will automatically be there and it is then just a matter of choosing a file format for download/conversion and hitting the download button. It really is that simple. As my screenshot reveals however, I didn’t realize that it was that easy until I started experimenting with Elltube:

Professional Development

vsl55 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:55:46 CST

Links to various Professional development sites. The list below contains both links and comments on content found there. Please feel free to add lnks and provide comments.

Name	Comments
Educational Technology Journals & Professional Organizations	Tucson United School District portal
Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students - Ruth Reynard, THE Journal Students who object to the inclusion of blogs in a course are usually objecting to what they perceive will be just one more task on top of a myriad of others or simply some busy work that will not benefit their learning.	A quick list of tips for Blog usage in a classroom
The Information Revolution	A 5 minute video highlighting the changes digitial information offers and requires of us.
The HP Teacher Experience Exchange (HP TEE) is a web site where instructors can collaborate and share classroom-ready, computer-based lesson plans. Visitors to the site have the ability to browse through proven lesson plans that have the potential to engage students and make the learning process more exciting by using technology.	The HP TEE features forums for teachers of grades K through 5, 6 through 8, and 9 through 12. Teachers have the ability to discuss best practices and share powerful lessons that helped students gain greater understanding.
In Search of Student-Generated Content in Online Learning	A white paper describing what student generated content is and why it matters
Measuring Skills for the 21st Century	A white paper written by Elena Silva, senior policy analyst at the Education Sector think tank in Washington. Focus is on what studetns can and need to do with such skills.
The MOFET ITEC Content Portal : The objective of the International Content Portal in teacher education is to improve the flow of pedagogical knowledge and research on teacher education by helping researchers and teacher educators cope and keep abreast with the wealth of publications in the field.	The portal's uniqueness resides in the coordinated processes of collecting, filtering, processing and distributing relevant research and non-research papers on education and teacher education within "one integrative reservoir". In addition, portal users are invited to make use of the site's reaction system and share their knowledge and insights regarding the contents presented with other users.
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics: A public voice of mathematics education, providing vision, leadership and professional development to support teachers in ensuring equitable mathematics learning of the highest quality for all students.	Founded in 1920, NCTM is the world’s largest mathematics education organization, with more than 100,000 members and 230Affiliatesthroughout the United States and Canada.
North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCCTM): The professional organization in North Carolina of all persons responsible for the teaching of mathematics.	Membership includes teachers from all levels, kindergarten through graduate school, and other professionals who work with curriculum and materials for the teaching of mathematics.
Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge	Online draft of a publication focused on online learning and education
PBS Teachers Connect: An online community of teachers exchanging ideas, resources and instructional strategies on the integration of digital media and technology.	Exclusive content from PBS offers the ability to Save Classroom Resources and connect with teachers who use PBS resources
School United: Blogs, school and educators using Web 2.0. Anyone looking to find other folks using technology in the classroom ought to take a look here.	A social network focusing on educators and education
Technology Immersion Program (TIP): The Technology Immersion Project is implementing an entirely new concept in educational technology—total immersion of teachers and students in technology. TIP steps beyond 1:1 computing experiments to completely envelope campuses in technology, extending learning beyond classroom walls and beyond the school day.	Resources of interest toschools, resources of interest tovendors and resources of interest to education policymakers, school officials and the general public.
Texas Instruments Online Professional development courses: Free online courses built around TI handheld technology	Popular T³ Online Courses are now FREE. These are the same high-quality professional development coursesthat you expect from T³.

Data and Mashup Makers

vsl55 — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:30:39 CST

The internet provides many free online data sources, mashup makers and situational application tools. These tools are in various states of maturity. Some offer good support; others are 'as-is'.

Data Sources, Mashups and Situational Applications

Name and Description	More Information
Dapper:Easily provide new means for people to access your content (such as RSS). You can use Dapper to create feeds, widgets, and APIs with your content and links.	Watch an intro to dapper
DAMIA: Through a Web-based interface, IBM DAMIA provides easy-to-use tools that developers and IT users alike can use to quickly assemble data feeds from the Internet and a variety of enterprise data sources.	An IBM Alphaworks data mashup maker. Not quite 'all there yet', but a reasonable tool set for the more technically inclined
Magic/Replace is a tool to make changes to all of the rows of a data table at once.	Nifty free tool that can be used to 'reformat' spreadsheet data.
QEDWiki: QEDWiki is a browser-based assembly canvas used to create simple mashups. A mashup maker is an assembly environment in which the creator of a mashup uses software components (or services) made available by content providers.	An IBM Alphaworks situational application mashup maker. A nice tool set for the more technically inclined.
Yahoo Pipies: Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.	Yahoo application that provides simple commands to create output that meets your needs

Virtual Technology

vsl55 — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 08:26:19 CST

JumpBox Open is a collection of easy to use virtual appliances for Open Source software. Each JumpBox is focused on a single task (or single application) and is carefully crafted to capture the best practices for how the software should be implemented. The goal is to save you time and allow you to get more done with less effort.JumpBoxes will run on all of the popular virtualization platforms including VMWare, Parallels, Microsoft Virtual PC/Server, Virtual Iron and Xen. There are jumpboxs for wikis, blogs, moodle and many other uses.

RezEd is a hub for everything related to learning and virtual worlds! Each month they feature inter-related podcasts, brief best practices, digital resources in the library, and featured blog posts and discussions.

Software Virtualization: A look at how virtualization can change classroom computer usage. To accomplish true personalized learning,“we have to move beyond textbooks,” ...

Report: Virtual Learning Expands Educational Opportunities :The report, "Learning Virtually: Expanding Opportunities" focuses on a number of programs that have emerged in recent years that have succeeded in bringing new opportunities to students who might otherwise miss out owing to geographic or economic limitations, such as being stuck in a district that does not offer college preparatory courses or having to work to may hours in a week to be able to make a go of a traditional learning environment.

Education in Second Life. Topics on a Virtual classroom:
Second Life: exploring the potential for real leanring a virtual world. - A video about Second Life education
Arwenna Stardust’s Second Life Blog - Second Life in Education focused blog.
Getting Started in Second Life
Educational Uses for Second Life
101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom

Technology

vsl55 — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:01:03 CST

A major theme of this wiki is collaborative technology with a special focus on online tools and integration of those tools. Why should one use technology in the classroom. Read Nine Excellent Reasons for Technology in Education to find out.

See Coming of Age: An Introduction to the NEW Worldwide Web for an introduction to many of the aspects of what Web 2.0 technology means and can bring to your classroom.

Read How Web 2.0 has changed the face of education for recent thinking on how students are affected, both pro and con by Web 2.0 technologies.

Steven Downes Integrating the Internet into the Classroom - Interesting chart deck showing a few ways technology can make a classroom more interesting. Also, check out Steven's Using Blogs to Enhance Learning - Some Helpful Tips

Web 2.0 in Education (UK) Home: Another wetpaint wiki containing a slew of great links to tools.

The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On: A look at where education is headed in the next decade

Word Processing tools with commentary - A list of Online collaborative word processing tools.

White board and Collaborations tools with commentary - A list of tools for screen sharing and electronic whiteboards.

Wiki, file sharing and collaborative technology tools with commentary - Wiki, telephony, video conferencing, file sharing, webhosting, RSS and other collaborative technology and tools.

Data and Mashup tools with commentary - A list of data sources, mashup and situational applications.

Online mathematics tools and widgets with commentary - A list of mathematics applets and free tools.

Virtual tools and desktop virtualization - Virtual tooling and desktop/server virtualization in education.

Integration of tools and technology - Attempts to integrate individual tools, technology and techniques into working 'sets'

General Office tools , image editing application, screen capture and more - A list of useful, free tools that don't fit into any of the above categories.

Special Needs and Assistive Technology - A list of assitive technology for users with special needs

Consortium for School Networking
Consortium for School Networking: CoSN is a voice for K-12 education leaders who use technology strategically to improve teaching and learning.

eSchool Site of the Week: A weekly highlight on eSchool web sites of interest.

Free and Open Source Software Directory
Free and Open Source Software Directory: A user-edited collection of open source software useful to those involved in education. It is organised according to subject area and/or common tasks.

General Technical Tips and Tools links:
lifehacker : Daily weblog on software and personal productivity recommends downloads, web sites and shortcuts that help you work smarter and save time.
21st Century Learning: A community of educators embarking on a collaborative journey into the future of education, educational technologies and new curriculums in order to prepare our students to function in a competitive and rapidly changing global world.

K-12 Open Technologies Initiative
K-12 Open Technologies Initiative CoSN K-12 Open Technologies Leadership Initiative. The initiative is sponsored by Apple, IBM, Pearson Education, and the Wm. & Flora Hewlett Foundation to support the adoption and utilization of open technologies in K-12 education around the world.

Thornburg Center:
Open Source Education Links: Exceptional open source focused site.

University of Utah:
Peter Alfred, Univeristy of Utah, pages of java applets and java byte code.

Getting Access to Blocked Websites

vsl55 — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 20:43:31 CST

WikiPedia to go (an offline download for schools)

Is WikiPedia blocked at your school or library? Are administrators, teachers, and librarians in your school district wary to permit students to use WikiPedia for research purposes because of its dynamic nature? Check out "wikipedia' on a jumpdrive or as a DVD.

Many school districts use software that blocks certain websites. This can be really frustrating to teachers that know there are learning opportunities missed because of district policies.

There is hope!

Through this page, teachers will (hopefully) get all the (easy to use) tools to get access to useful, but currently blocked, websites in their classroom.

I want teachers to be able to find form letters that they can personalize by filling in a few blanks and send to the right people in their district to gain access to these potentially educational websites.
Hopefully, I can get up something useful soon and, with your help, one of the biggest obstacles to using web-based technology in the classroom will no longer be an issue.

Directly from the CMS intranet:

What should I do if I feel that a website that is being blocked should be available for viewing because of its educational value?
Schools: Review the site with your Principal Designated School Technology Contact. The Technology Contact will complete and send the Webpage Review Request form located under Web Applications on the CMS Intranet. If the Principal Designated School Technology Contact does not see the Webpage Review Request choice under Web Applications please have them complete and submit the Principal Designated Paperwork. This form contains Technology Contact information as well as Webmaster information. All other locations: Submit the request to your supervisor. After their approval, they can submit the Administrative Building Website Review Request form or email filtering@cms.k12.nc.us.