Educational Software Resources

Today I am going to show everyone a few educational software resources that I have found to be very useful in my teaching.  This list is split up into eight software categories with the resource I find most useful listed.  I hope you get something out of it.

Drill and Practice - http://www.brainpop.com/math/

            Brainpop offers all sorts of drill and practice games and activities for learners of all levels of math.  It can help students to reinforce skills they have just learned or brush up on things they may have forgotten and give “instant feedback”. (Roblyer and Doering, p 84)

Tutorial - http://www.yourteacher.com/

            Yourteacher.com has videos that walk students through how to do different math problems.  You also have practice problems with solution and take assessments to test yourself.

Simulation - http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/

            This is a collection of all kinds of web applets that will help students better visualize and understand the math that is going on in a given problem.

Instructional Games - http://www.math-play.com/Geometry-Math-Games.html

            Here you will find a collection of different geometry based math games.  This helps to solve the “Learning verse having fun” (Roblyer and Doering, p 97) problem.  It is a great way to have students learn math and have fun while doing it.

Problem Solving - http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/high-school-teachers/807

            CriticalThink.org is a great website for teachers to help get students to learn how to problem solve.  The first step to solving a problem is to critically think about the given problem, and this site help students do just that.  One benefit of this is “improved interest and motivation” (Roblyer and Doering, p 100)

Integrated Learning Systems - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/

            Microsoft Office is the standard collection of integrated learning systems that “allows collaboration on documents” (Roblyer and Doering, p 119).  It includes Word for word processing, Excel for creating spreadsheets, and PowerPoint for creating presentations.

Software Support Tool 1 - http://www.pdfforge.org/

            This is a free PDF creator and Converter.  You can create PDF from Word documents and more importantly, convert existing PDF files into Word.

Software Support Tool 2 - http://www.wikipedia.org/

            Wikipedia is a free, vast online “research and reference tool” (Roblyer and Doering, p 141) that is user generated.  I have found it to be more accurate than any other encyclopedia due to the fact it is constantly being updated.  Just make sure you check the sources.

            This is by no means a complete and comprehensive list.  There are so many great resources out there with new ones being added everyday.  As my list changes I will let you know.

Technologies old and new

It is very interesting that as there are more and more information, tools, and applications put on the web everyday, the school’s firewall blocks more and more of them from being used.  I understand the reason that sites like Facebook and YouTube are blocked. However, I also know that there are many educational way to use sites like these and others.  At my school we have wireless Internet throughout the school, while the desktop computers that we have do not have wireless cards to access them.  Even if you get a USB wireless adapter you can only connect to the guest network for security reasons.  This prevents me from using programs like Air Server to mirror what I am doing on my iPad.  Each of the algebra and geometry teachers were given an iPad at the beginning of the year with the new book adoption.   With this Air Server it would make this device much more beneficial to my students.  This is much like when Anna had the two new computers in her classroom but didn’t have the software to take advantage of it.  “She found some free and “shareware” drill-and practice instructional practices and instructional game software packages, and successfully lobbied the principal to buy others” (Roblyer and Doering, 3).  Myself and other teachers have talked with our principal about the wireless network situation and it seems like we might be coming to some kind of a solution.    I can only imagine what types of problems that I will face in the future.  I think that we will see the virtual classroom becoming more and more common.  With the evolution of educational social networks like Edmodo, I think education will continue to have more of a presence in the virtual world.  My students already depend on this social network to get information like homework, test dates, and even turn in assignments.  This virtual world is not without its own problems.  One of the biggest problems with most social networks and teenagers is cyber bulling.  As there are more and more outlets for the students to have an online presence there are also more ways for them to abuse the power.  I think this will become an increasing problem in the future.  As we overcome these and other obstacles, I think that the greatest power that these new technologies bring is in the area of scaffolding.  We can use these technologies to reach each student where they are and help be the best they can be.

Hello ED 527

My level of comfort with technology is a 5 out of 4.