Tag Archive for interactive

Turning your iPad into a Mobile Interactive White Board!

June 24, 2011 education, Flash, iPad, iPad applications, Teaching, TechFriends(Geeks), Technology 2 comments

I am SO excited!   I download an app today that turned my iPad into a MOBILE interactive white board for $9.99!!  It seemed expensive at first (for an iPad app), but after I downloaded and played with it, and saw that I could even annotate over any screen, and control my computer from anywhere in the room, $9.99 seemed pretty darn cheap!!

The app is called Splashtop Whiteboard.  You can download it through the apple itunes store or learn more about it at the following link:

http://www.splashtop.com/whiteboard

 

I started off by first downloading Splashtop Remote Desktop for iPad.  It is great!  I can finally run Flash on my iPad by running my browser through my desktop (or laptop in my case).  You can see a Flash animation I built running on my iPad in the screenshot above.

Then I decided to download the Splashtop Whiteboard app, too.

The iPad screenshot above is of some Flash animations on my website – before using the annotation tools available in the Spashtop Whiteboard app.

If you look at the screenshot below, you will see the annotation tools at the top of the screen.

I can annotate LIVE from my iPad onto my desktop!  If I am teaching a class, I just hook the computer up to the projector (like normal) but now I can walk around the room using my iPad to control my computer and annotate over any program!  If you want to annotate over your screens, then Splashtop Whiteboard is the app for you, but if you only want to be able to remote into your computer using your iPad, then the less expensive Splashtop Remote Desktop app will work perfectly.  You do not need to purchase both of them, though – it appears from my first use of them that the Splashtop Whiteboard does everything the Remote Desktop does, but also allows you to annotate.

I definitely feel like I got my money’s worth on the Whiteboard app!    I can’t wait to try it out in the classroom!!

 

Story Boards for Kids…and Adults!

May 30, 2011 education, Livescribe, Livescribe, story boards, TechFriends(Geeks), writing Comments Off on Story Boards for Kids…and Adults!

A recent trip to San Francisco connected me to some really fantastic teachers with amazing energy and enthusiasm!  Zoe is one such person.    To get to know her better, here is her website:

https://sites.google.com/site/zoebraniganpipe/

She also writes a  blog about smartpen uses:  http://livewithlivescribe.edublogs.org/*
*This site was developed as part of a joint Ministry of education and Ontario Teacher Federation funded project with a focus on teacher learning and professional development. In this project, teachers collaborate and discuss the uses of the Livescribe pen in the classroom.

Her family was lucky enough to make the trip to San Francisco with her, and her 8 year old son created this wonderful storyboard about his adventures in San Francisco using a Livescribe smartpen.  (Thank you Zoe for letting me share your son’s wonderful pencast!)

I think this is a fantastic idea for teachers to use with students who feel like they are not good writers, or don’t know how to get started!   If you have your students make pencasts, please share them with me at tech4mathed.sg@gmail.com

 

1-Subject A5 Notebook 4 p. 50 (click on this link if you cannot see the pencast below)
brought to you by Livescribe
 

Summer Projects for Visual and Interactive Math

May 20, 2011 Algebra, Camtasia, education, GeoGebra, GeoGebra, HyperStudio, Interactive Projects, Livescribe, Livescribe, Math Projects, Mathematica, Photoshop, Teaching, TechFriends(Geeks), WolframAlpha 3 comments

Visual Interactive Learning
I have been sitting here staring at my computer for the past week since I got back from an amazing time with a room full of extremely innovative teachers in San Francisco as part of the Livescribe Educational Advisory Board.

I keep staring at it not being able to decide where to start!  I have so many new ideas that I want to implement for the Fall, and now I have even more resourceful people to guide me when I get stuck!

Some of the big ones on my list I have already started working with, but I want to dig deeper and create projects for my students to interact with, and also projects for them to create:

Hyperstudio5 (Roger Wagner will be at ISTE this summer, so that will be fun!)
GeoGebra
Camtasia
Livescribe (new cool stuff coming next week!!)

The newest application I want to learn:

I have been playing with WolframAlpha for the past year, but I recently purchased Mathematica and I am excited to see what I can create with it! My goal is to create visual and interactive materials for Algebra and Geometry.    I will post as soon as I start building!  I am still watching the video tutorials for now.   I want to look further into the following links as well:

Wolfram Research STEM Initiative

Wolfram Faculty Program

Lastly, I NEED to learn Photoshop.   My oldest son currently creates all of my artwork for my projects, but in a few years he will be off to college and won’t be around to help me!

Hopefully between spending time with my family and attending ISTE and HI-TEC this summer, I will be able to dig deeper and create some projects for next Fall using some of these great interactive applications!

 

Creating INTERACTIVE activities with HyperStudio5!

April 13, 2011 Algebra, education, HyperStudio, Interactive Projects, Math Projects, Mathcast, Teaching Online, TechFriends(Geeks) 2 comments

Link to the official Hyperstudio website

In my spare time (ha ha) I have been playing with Roger Wagner’s Hyperstudio 5.   (Luckily Roger Wagner himself has been helping me!!)  What a fun program!    My goal is to create more INTERACTIVE activities and tutorials/videos for my students, without all the work of Flash.   Hyperstudio fits that goal amazingly well!   It is similar to PowerPoint, but far more incredible in my book!

I “finished” my first final draft (I keep “fixing it” so it is forever in draft mode) of an interactive tutorial on introducing combinations and counting, and posted the project on a new area of my website with the button “HyperStudio Projects”.

Before clicking on the link below that will take you to the Hyperstudio stack, you must first make sure you are using either Safari or Internet Explorer, because these are the only browsers that have the Hyperstudio web-brower add-on for now.   To get the browser add-on, go to:  http://www.mackiev.com/support_hs.html , click on the proper computer type, then get the browser add-in for either Safari or Internet Explorer, then you will be able to view and PLAY WITH the activity.

Here is the direct link to my first project: http://www.tech4mathed.com/HyperStudio/IceCream_SG.html

If you have the browser add-on correctly installed you should see the following screen:

Once the stack is finished loading, the screen should look like:

Now you are ready to click on “go to STORY”.

I created the story like a video, and I narrated every screen, so you can  hear the narration if you click on the button. The audio level needs some work, some of the narration is too quiet and I will need to redo those sections.  The most fun part of it, however, is the INTERACTIVITY that was easy to create!

In this activity, I created an Ice Cream Playground, where you can actually move around all the objects on the page to explore and find the answer before viewing the explanation of the solution.  My 14 year old son did all of the artwork for me!   It is wonderful having a live-in artist on hand!

Please give it a try and let me know what I can do to make it more interesting for my students.   I also need to know if you are able to view it on a Mac and on a Windows machine.  Some Windows machines can view it and some cannot, so I am trying to trouble-shoot which versions of Windows have difficulty to help find a fix for that.

I am excited to make more projects and play with Hyperstudio!

 

 

I Made My First Interactive GeoGebra Applet!

December 29, 2010 Algebra, education, GeoGebra, Math Projects, online tools, Software, Teaching Online, TechFriends(Geeks), Technology 4 comments

Logo taken from the GeoGebra website – holiday version!

I have met several people in the past year (some only virtually) who have convinced me that learning GeoGebra would be a great addition to my tech tools for teaching mathematics. Since GeoGebra is FREE, it makes it an even better resource as a teacher and tech ed consultant, and also for student projects as well! Geometry is one of my favorite subjects to teach;  in the past I used Geometer’s Sketchpad, but in the future I plan on using GeoGebra!

I believe WordPress is not allowing me to directly embed the <applet> Javascript code for my first GeoGebra applet, so I created a new set of webpages on my Tech4MathEd site where I will be posting all of the GeoGebra applets I create.   I am just learning, so there is only 1 there now 🙂

To see my first interactive GeoGebra applet, which helps students understand graphing a line using the slope-intercept form of the line by interacting with the graph, go to  Slope Intercept GeoGebra Applet.

I am really looking forward to using GeoGebra, not only to create interactive applets for my Algebra students, but also to help my Math For Elementary Teacher classes learn more about Geometry!

To download  and start playing with GeoGebra, go to:  download GeoGebra

Image of my interactive applet:

 
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