Techie Learning Tech

This week we created a chart using the software package "Inspiration." It's a really cool program which allows you to create beautiful looking tree charts, web charts, etc. easily. I really like the "outline" feature, which automatically translates a flow-chart into an outline and vice-versa.

The only thing I wish it had was an equation editor, or at least support for copying/pasting math symbols. Instead, I had to edit an equation in MS Word, take a screenshot, paste it into MS Paint and then insert the .bmp into Inspiration.

Nonetheless, I think this will definitely become part of my software arsenal. I was looking through the built-in templates, and it includes one for lesson plans. This could actually make writing lesson plans fun (imagine that)!

Last week we had the assignment of completing a "Digital Scavenger Hunt" in small groups, where we had to find various things related to our content areas, take photos and create a Google Docs presentation exhibiting the photos.

As math people, we had to find various geometric shapes and so-forth. Being the overachieving nerds that we are, we then edited the photos using MS Paint and outlined the shapes to better illustrate before resizing them to 4x6 and 72 ppi.

Here's our presentation embedded below:

I'm having fun collecting all of the links from this class in my Diigo account. I tend to prefer Diigo to Delicious since its browser toolbar also lets you annotate and highlight webpages in addition to the social bookmarking.

Of the links we've looked at, I found Wordle to be really cool. Even though its applicability in math is probably pretty slim, I really liked the concept. Being able to copy and paste an important document and have the size of the words in the resulting "Wordle" reflect the number of times that words appears in the document lets you really get the gist of something.

I created a Wordle using an abbreviated version of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem which appears at the bottom of my blog.