Blog Post #5

Google has lots of tools! The first one I want to talk about is the google calendar. Our school uses google calendar and I started a calendar of my own through this class. I recently bought an iphone and downloaded an app so that I can access my school calendar, personal calendar, and phone calendar all at one spot. The app is called "Calengoo" and seems easy to use. With google calendar, I was able to combine the school calendar, my personal calendar, and a calendar of U.S. Holidays. Each calendar is a different color so I can easily see each day what is on my agenda for that day.

Other tools I explored include Google Squared. I searched "regular polygons" and it showed a really good square. It listed many polygons, the item names, the image, and a description of each. I clicked on "add a new column" and found the measure of each interior angle.

I looked up some books using Google Books. I searched for Geometry and lots of examples popped up, but nothing that I wanted to use in my class. I searched for "math is fun" and found a book called "190 Ready-to-use activities to make math fun."

As I explored Google Reader, I realized that it shows many of the pages of the book and I have the option to buy if I wanted.

I noticed that Blogs that I follow as a part of Blogger.com show up in my google reader. I recently started following a blog designed by our technology department. In the blog, there was a post about "PI" day - March 14 - that listed some comics that I shared with my class.

Google Earth is pretty fascinating. The first thing I did was try and find my house to see what it looks like from the air. I could incorporate this into my class by having students search for their houses and other St. Louis landmarks and using the latitude and longitude, have students use the distance formula to find the distance between each point. This makes learning more fun and real for the students. Here is a website that lists real world lessons that I can incorporate into my classroom. http://www.realworldmath.org/Real_World_Math/Lessons.html

Blog Post #4

On my igoogle page, I added a few extra gadgets that what was required. One of the gadgets is "Famous Optical Illusions." I'm always fascintated by optical illusions. Since I teach geometry, I think optical illusions are a great way to introduce students to geometric figures and topics.

I also added the gadget "Google Translate." When I taught at Poplar Bluff Junior High, I had a student with limited English profenciency. I used a translation website to translate directions and assignments from English to Spanish. Google Translate will be a great resource to use in a situation like this.

"Mathchallenge.net" and "Number Cruncher Game" are great mind challenging math games that I could share with my students. I tried playing the "Number Cruncher Game" and it's definitely a great challenge to exercise the brain.

I also like the weather so I enjoy seeing the "Weather" gadget.

Blog Post #3

There were quite a few websites and resources listed in the text for teachers and students. One teacher website that I found useful and would use in the classroom is http://www.proteacher.com/. It seems very user friendly and returned many relevant websites for the search. I often personally use http://www.google.com/ for most of my searches in the classroom and it seems to be a quick, easy, and reliable website for many searches. Even for students, it has a default setting to "moderate" filter to prevent many unwanted websites. The text explores some other options for search sites for students, including http://www.kidsclick.org/. I tried to search some high school mathematics terms like 'distributive, quadratic, and sine' and no results were returned. I'm not sure this would be a good site for high school. In my classroom (and the test mentions this also) I use http://www.math.com/. It has lots of good examples and resources for students to use if they are struggling with concepts. I've also used http://www.mathforum.org/ to get ideas and allow students to search items.