Some math ed tech links

Check out Hypernom, the new 4-D math game from Vi Hart and partners in (crime?) Andrea Hawksley (AH) and Henry Segerman. It’s pretty crazy — and beautiful. Nom nom nom. I can’t believe I missed this for so long. I got the link from a post on MathMunch, which is itself a very fun blog on […]

Surface Pro vs iPad

Recently I’ve been working with MCFAM to create supplementary online learning materials for probability. Tons of people take probability and need to learn it for professional exams, and we’d like to serve our U of M students and the wider community even better. Along the way I’ve been looking at ways to create this content. I’ve […]

Desmos: a really fancy calculator, but much more

The Twittersphere recently made me aware of Desmos, a really fancy online graphing calculator. Fortunately, I was not introduced to it as such: I found it through a blog by a math teacher that now and then features a “maths gems” post — little tidbits of interest to mathy people and math teachers. The gems post that […]

The flipped classroom: reports from the field

For those of us in academia, the fall semester is wrapping up. It’s a time when we reflect on the success or lack thereof in our fall classes, because it’s almost over, the final is coming, and we either feel pretty happy, totally depressed, or a sense of oncoming dread. These correspond to the feelings […]

Lightweight math apps

Something I’ve seen more and more of lately is very lightweight apps that deal with algebra or other K-12 math topics. Last night I met the creator of Algebra Touch, Sean Berry. Algebra Touch is a pretty app that lets you play with algebra expressions: you can simplify, add, divide, factor, and more with a touch […]

Some interesting pre-calculus resources

My colleague Mike Weimerskirch at the University of Minnesota has set up a nice site of precalculus resources. It’s got videos, slides, and transcripts of short lectures on a variety of precalc topics, as well as links to appropriate sections of three free online textbooks. If you’re a current teacher, this is a great resource […]

Math on the web: innovations from Khan Academy

The folks at Khan Academy are doing some very interesting things. Today I heard about an effort they’re calling KaTeX, math typesetting for the web. It is designed to be a fast alternative to MathJax, as far as I can tell — MathJax is great in some ways but can take a while to render. The […]

Consumption and creation, K-12 discussion

2012 post encouraging creation on an iPad Broadening the discussion to task complexity and duration A forum discussion with some student views. Notice that they talk about music, movies, papers, pictures. Spreadsheets come up as not so good on an iPad. Math is not discussed. Are iPads only good for arty applications? An example of teachers […]

iPads in my neighborhood

All the somewhat abstract discussion of ed tech have come home, to my own school district of St Paul, MN. I grew up in the Saint Paul schools and the superintendent, Valeria Silva, was one of my teachers at the spanish immersion school I attended for the first four years of my public education. Back […]

Privacy, education, e-texts

I found an interesting blog post recently that discusses briefly software that tracks how much and when you read your e-textbook. There’s so much nuance to this discussion. Compare the following: This e-textbook integrates seamlessly with technology designed to analyze student reading habits, allowing teachers to understand where students are having trouble with readings and target […]