Evernote

Today I discovered a new application, Evernote, and it's many uses, especially in education. Evernote has great suggestions for teachers and how to use the application in the classroom. The link to the blog can be found here, 10 Tips for Teachers Using Evernote.

What I like best about Evernote is it's availability from multiple devices. You can easily archive documents on your hard drive and search for them (at least this is true on a Mac) but if you want, you can access them from a smart phone or iPad (maybe one day I will be so lucky to get one). With a smartphone, you can take pictures and immediately put them into evernote to access on your computer later. For instance a picture of a white board after class or certain hand written notes. You can easily email students any notes you have, say those pictures of the white board you took, or if a student missed a class and needs the notes from you, or even to create a shared notebook that parents can view along with students.

I'm going to mess around with the application some more to find out all of its great features. Perhaps I will integrate it into my classroom and encourage my students to use it as well.

Tech and Topics

I leared quite a lot about using technology in education and the importance of teaching 21st century skills to students. I think there are many items that were discussed that I will utilize in my classroom, especially the different modes for presentations. Also it put into perspective the use of blogs for communication in and out of the classroom between students and teachers and the students among themselves.

21st Century Presentations

A great website for presentation making is prezi.com. I especially love this program because it creates presentations that are not linear. You can still set up a sequence of views in a specific order for a presentation, but you have the option to be able to have an overview picture of the entire topic. I find this so helpful, especially with math concepts since there is usually an umbrella term or concept from which other ideas and concepts come from and it's great to be able to show students that path from getting from the main idea to the individual topics and then BACK to the main idea.

I created a presentation on Prezi for the Legal case, Pickering vs. BOE which you can see on the prezi website. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out and I found the program very easy to use. I'll likely be using Prezi again and again for classroom presentations.

Flatland

First Post

Hi

This is my first blog post as a future math teacher. I love math and cannot wait to share it with the world.