One of the components of the Math course I teach requires students to perform mental arithmetic and processing through audio cues so I thought it would be good to record a sample of what a test could sound like.
I recorded it a few times checking the audio quality and also shutting off the heater (it made a difference). I also edited the file in order to give the students 5 seconds to answer each question and also deleted sections with noise in the background.
Week 4 Activity 4 – Resize an Image to Create a Thumbnail
(By Joxemai – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33103353)
Here is a thumbnail of a probability tree diagram.
Week 4 Activity 3 – Create an Educational Graphic Using Layers
This is a series of images that I created to teach the significance of the number ‘e’. I used Graphic for Mac, created the base image and then added layers with different colored parts. By showing and hiding different layers, I exported a series of images which I put into a slideshow to show the progression.
Week 3 Activity 2 – Create and Comment on Educational Graphics
I created a graphic to use in my Grade 10 Math class to help with the learning objective: Continuation of a sequence of patterns and the determination of the general term. Many students were easily able to identify patterns for triangular and square numbers but had difficult when it came to these “Stellar numbers”. I tried to keep the selection of important information minimal and prominent and organize the graphic to help develop understanding of the underlying patterns. Some of the actions and tools I used were the simple color scheme of two colors to clearly identify the parts I was trying to highlight. After creating the graphic, I was unsure of the color choice as the cyan font is a little difficult to see.
Week 3 Activity 1 – Crop a Photo
I usually do my image editing in native apps like Pixelmator, Graphic and Preview for Mac. However, I thought I would try Sumopaint to crop and do some basic editing, like removing text, since students would have access to it when doing an assessment that requires editing images.
[Original]
[Crop]
A cropped and “clean” version of the image that could be used to test the students
Through this activity, I also saw how limited the selection was for images of Mathematical diagrams on Creative Commons and on Flickr’s Creative Commons licensed photo selection. I had more success doing some searching in Wikimedia Commons but often the image is not exactly what I’m looking for. I hope to learn how to become better at creating my own images through this course.
Week 2 Activity 1 – Playing around with LaTeX
Here I am experimenting with adding Math equations to my blog post. First, I (actually Keith) installed a plugin called QuickLaTeX on WordPress. If the shortcode is added to the page, it will send each piece of LaTeX code on the page to quicklatex.com, render them into images and return the URLs. I have noticed that the images are a little too low-res for my liking and I may experiment with other ways to get cleaner LaTeX equations on the page.
Kaz’s Introduction
Hello EDDL 5131 class,
Sorry for the late introduction. I am a late joiner to the class but will do my best over the next few weeks to catch up. Thank you Keith for allowing me in.
My name is Kaz and I am currently teaching High School Mathematics at an international school in Japan. I completed a Civil Engineering degree at UBC but through a variety of work experiences, I found that it wasn’t for me. I went to Japan to teach English and fell in love with teaching. Upon returning to get a Bachelor of Education degree through SFU’s PDP program, I returned to Japan and started teaching at various international schools.
This is my first EDDL course and I’m interested in learning how I can use multimedia to get my students more engaged in the content and to think and learn more independently. My long-term goal is to create an interactive website where students can learn the entire course on their own.
I look forward to working with you all.
Kaz