I have been working mostly by myself for the last couple weeks on a course for the upcoming school year. Thus, I have postponed plans to Write. Instead of adopting a pre-made course. I opted to use our existing materials and strategies to write a course from scratch. The directive given by our district is to switch to an integrated math curriculum. I am not sold on integrated per se, but I am not against it either. I wrote the course with the strategies that teachers are currently trying. Namely, flip teaching, Socratic seminar, debate, and collaborative online documents. One of the key additions is that I want my students to have electronic portfolios on Google Documents. I want them to rewrite their notes and develop, "My Math Book". I also want them to create a spreadsheet called, "My Grade". This year I had them have both a sketchbook and a notebook. I plan to more or less replace all of that with electronic versions using Google documents and applications for Chrome. For those schools like ours that are considering switching from Microsoft to Google Document applications you should be aware of some limitations.

Google Documents: Cons: 1) There is lousy foreign language support. Your best bet is to copy and paste from another source and hope it works. It will translate documents, but does not allow you to insert accents or tildes and the like. It does not provide an support for typing in any language other than English. 2) It has a lousy equation editor. It is almost impossible to make good worksheets. 3) There are fewer formatting features than other applications

Pros: It is probably the best online collaboration tool available. It allows multiple users to simultaneously chat, comment, and work on a document from separate workstations. It is cloud based and seemingly instantaneously updates the documents without having to click "save". It also keeps track of who wrote what and notes changes much better than Word. The collaborative feature is its best selling point and for this reason I use it for any document that I want to keep as a reference among team members, such as pacing calendars and lists of web resources.



The So far, I have been looking for good applications to use. I have not found an application I like for making diagrams and would be open to suggestions. I did find the following free applications helpful...

1) Desmos Graphing Calculator: Desmos is one of the most friendly graphing calculator applications I have found. The method of input is very intuitive and simple. Many equations can be graphed with ease. It is much easier to use than most graphing calculators. You can make tables to plot points, or just to produce input output values and make comments in your work area. It also has many pre-made templates that are perfect for math education. You change the scale and window of your graph the same way you would when using Google Maps, by zooming in or out and grabbing the page to shift it over as you would in and dragging. You can also trace along a graph to help identify various points. It is perfect for algebra problems and allows you to save your work as a picture that you can share with anyone. You can also overlay pictures on the graph for algebraic modeling.

2) Geogebra: Geogebra has been a hot topic in education for some time. In some ways it is more versatile than Desmos, but it also not quite as simple to use. Its main appeal is that it not only can graph functions, but in reverse lines, circles, point, and so forth can be drawn on the graph and Geogebra will simultaneously generate the equations. Of course, the Algebra window can be closed if your only interest is to perform some geometric constructions. It is dynamic, so Geometric constructions can be manipulated, dragged, distorted, or resized simply. The drawing tools allow you to do the same basic things that you could do with a compass and straightedge, but it is not a simulations. Many basic constructions that would require several steps with a compass and straight edge, such as drawing a circle defined by three points or making a parallel line to a given line passing through a point are prepackaged and can be performed instantly. This application has its own YouTube channel and lots of online support.


3) Daum Equation editor: Google documents does not have very good support for writing equations. In fact, it is lousy for writing worksheets. So, I needed something that allowed me to write a few equations. It allows you to quickly write equations using a standard keyboard and will automatically rewrite it for you using the type of symbols that you would write on paper. It also contains drop down menus to insert symbols like you find in Microsoft Word's equation editor. However, it does not allow for standard text or text boxes. It simply allows you to save your equation as a basic text file, without the nice symbols and notation, or as a picture. So, it is limited. However, it will also solve equations by linking through Wolfram Alpha. So, in a way it is a good partner with the Wolfram Alpha search engine/solver. If you haven't tried Wolfram Alpha on its own it's grade for looking up facts and doing math, try typing in a simple problem and watch it give you rather sophisticated results- with extended features for paying customers.