Author: Dr Dave

What's In A Name?

Can you imagine the horror on the faces of my students when I tell them that they will work with other students in my class? What is even worse, they will be graded on this work? And it is a large portion of their overall grade in the class! The horror!

On the surface you might think of a math class as a course ripe for teaching by lecture format. There are a lot of concepts to get through and many examples to see worked out. Without my brilliant lectures, how on earth are they to succeed in such a demanding course?

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Use a Blog to Help Teach Your Math Class (Part 5)

laptop_02In Part 3 of this series, I demonstrated how easy it is to upload an image file to WordPress. For a mathematics teacher like myself, most of these images files are images of equations or graphs. In this post I want to go into more detail on how I capture these images using a screen capture utility called Snagit produced by Techsmith. Although there are many screen capture apps out there, Snagit is my favorite even though it is not free.

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Use a Blog to Help Teach Your Math Class (Part 4)

theme_01

In the first post in this series, we briefly looked at what a theme is and what it does for your blog. Simply put, a theme in WordPress controls the overall look and how information is presented on a blog. The screenshot above shows several themes produced by WordPress. Each year, the organization produces a new theme. By picking a theme from this set, you can be guaranteed that it will be compatible with WordPress and any future upgrades to WordPress.

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Matrices with Technology

wolfram_01As you may have noticed, some matrix operations are very tedious by hand. In particular, matrix multiplication and matrix inverses are much easier to do using a graphing calculator or WolframAlpha. In the Weekly Learning Plan, I put several handouts to help you use your calculator to do these problems.

However, some of you do not have a graphing calculator…you’ll need to use WolframAlpha to carry out these operations.

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Use a Blog to Help Teach Your Math Class (Part 3)

scrn02As a mathematics teacher, it all begins and ends with how easy it is to put math into a blog. If it is cumbersome to get it online, it is a no go. If it is unattractive, it is a no go. If some types of math are not available, it is a no go.

There are a numbers of ways to put mathematics into a blog. Over the past few years I have settled on a method that allows me to put any type of mathematics into a blog. The result is attractive, but slightly cumbersome. To do this I use two software tools, Mathtype and SnagIt. Free trials are available for both tools. Other tools might also be used to create equations and to capture them as gif or jpeg images.

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