Lattice Multiplication

I must admit that I am a bit of a Math Nerd.  I have been for most of my life and I can see that I probably will be for the foreseeable future.  I stumbled upon this site while doing some research for on of my graduate courses and wondered what “lattice multiplication” could be.  After reading through the information and trying it out for myself, I became a little excited.

I currently teach 6th grade math and have noticed that my students make come careless errors when working multiplication problems with factors greater than 1 digit.  Working these problems using the lattice method might help cut down on those errors, simply because it is different.  A link to the site can be found below.  I encourage you to read through and try it for yourself.

http://coolmath4kids.com/times-tables/times-tables-lesson-lattice-multiplication-1.html

 

Great Math Practice for PK – 8

IXL is a great website that you can use to have your students practice their math skills.  It is organized by grade level and there are many different skills student can practice.  The practice sets can be accessed for free.

There are many other great features that will be accessed with a paid membership.  You can set goals, track progress, and even earn awards for reaching goals.  Check out the IXL website today!

VoiceThread

Visit VoiceThread.com

This is one of the coolest technology tools that I have seen.  You can add pizzazz to a lecture or have your students us it to present a great report.  There are so many possibilities for application of this tool in the classroom.

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. VoiceThreads can even be embedded to show and receive comments on other websites and exported to MP3 players or DVDs to play as archival movies.

Click on this link to check out one use of VoiceThread.  A teacher is presenting a lab report from a science experiment.

Beautiful Word Clouds

Do you know what a “word cloud” is or why they are used?  A word cloud is a graphical representation of data that gives more weight to words that appear more often in the data set.  It can be used to help with spelling, present parts of a whole, synonyms for a word, antonyms for a word, etc.  Below is a word cloud that contains some of the US Constitution.

There are a few word cloud generators online, but Wordle is what I use.  You provide the text and Wordle creates the word cloud.  You can then alter the shape, colors, etc. to get the cloud you think will be the most effective for your application.

Quizlet

I don’t know about you, but I love making and reviewing flash cards.  So I went searching for a Web 2.0 tool that would allow me to create a set of flashcards, share them with others, and find other flash card sets that were already made.  Quizlet is a site that is an answer to my need.  You can search for previously created flash card sets covering hundreds of topics.  You can create a new set of flashcards and share them with other Quizlet users.  You can have your students access flash card sets in Quizlet and not only review them, but also play games with the flashcards.  As if that weren’t enough, you can also upload flash card sets to your smart phone or other mobile device with a Quizlet app and study on the go.    Did I mention all of this was free?  Check out Quizlet – the 21st century revolution of good ol’ flashcards.

Social Bookmarking

Do you know about social bookmarking?  I didn’t until a few days ago and absolutely love it!  Teachers like to neatly file most reference material into one category or another but have been unable to do that with our favorite websites until now.  Social bookmarking allows the user to create a site of bookmarks that are stored and sorted at the discretion of the user.  The site I use for social bookmarking is delicious.com. You can create an account for free and begin making a list of your favorite websites and marking them with tags right away.  I suggest that you follow the on-screen instructions for getting started.

Once you have some bookmarks with tags, you can them find other sites from those tags that other delicious users have bookmarked.  (That’s the “social” part of social bookmarking.)  I have provided a link to the education bookmarks on my delicious page so you can see what I have already bookmarked that is of interest to you.

Try it out and let me know what you think!