Teaching Math and Music with Technology

I have been using a Livescribe pen for about a year now to create online lessons for my algebra courses.  I teach Beginning and Intermediate Algebra at a community college, as hybrid classes.   In my case, hybrid means 4 days face-to-face (but all homework and quizzes are online) and 1 day a week I am trying to teach them to be online learners.   I create an online module for each Tuesday that the students must go through and then take an online quiz over.    I try to create a similar lesson to what I would have been doing in class.

I have found the Livescribe pen very easy to use, and it is simple to upload my pencasts to their community page.  From their online community, I can either post or email a link to the example I created, or embed it directly into a webpage.

Take a look through some of my pencasts (SGlascoe).

I find it difficult to look through all of the pencasts on the community page, since you cannot tell what the lesson (or artwork or notes) is referring to, since they are “out of context”.  Livescribe, however, does not let you download and keep the .swf file, so the only place to be able to store and then post from, at this point,  is their online community.  They have told me they are working on letting us download the files to our computer.

In my next post I will share my website with you and show you where I embed my pencasts for my students to watch.