Over 1,000,000 math fact problems solved!

We are excited to share that over 1 million math fact problems have been solve at aschool.us/math. Over 880,000 of them were solved correctly giving a student an accuracy of 86%.

How to draw a simple figure using Inkscape

This tutorial demonstrates how to draw a simple character using a few basic tools found in Inkscape. The tutorial could easily be adapted to most any other vector based drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.

How to draw a simple heart

This simple tutorial demonstrates how to create a simple heart using Inkscape (www.inkscape.org). It can be adapted to most any other vector based drawing program such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw.

Moodle & Mahara and other updates at ASchool.us

System Update:
Moodle has been upgraded to verstion 2.1.

Mahara as been added to the list of programs available at ASchool.us/moodle. Mahara is an electronic portfolio system that can be connected to Moodle through SSO. I've outlined a few of the great features that can make students lives easier.

• Single sign-on (SSO):
  Allows users to login to moodle and then move straight into Mahara without having to sign in again.
• Export Activities to Mahara from Moodle:A teacher can specify which assignments may be exported to Mahara.
• Drag and drop design interface:
  In Mahara students can create their portfolio through dragging and dropping documents, images, rss feeds, journal entries, etc... and add descriptions and comments where needed.

Course Development:

Integrating Technology and Education is a four week course that will help teachers use technology more effectively. It will cover the following topics through discussion, assignments, and group activities:

• Presentations, projectors, and document cameras
• Tools for students
• Managing technology
• Online resources

Students will interact with each other through a variety of online systems. The tools that you learn to use in this class will be tools that you can take with you to the classroom not just tools that you wish you could have.

Gimp for Educators is a self-paced course designed to help you learn to quickly and easily use different features in Gimp (www.gimp.org) to manipulate images and photos. The course is presented through both written and video instruction with help available through class forums. 

Tablet Exploration

I just ordered three Archos 7" tablets for my classroom from woot.com for $75 each. Sure it is an older version of the Android OS but all I was wanting it for was basic web browsing and videos. I'll post more about them when I receive them, the are in the mail but I will not get them for a while since I have to double ship them to get them to Alaska. Over the past several years I have toyed with the idea of creating a web based student response system (SRS) but never had the time to create it. At my previous teaching assignment I enjoyed using Quizdom's Q5's but can't justify the expense in my current position. While searching for educational blogs for an Integrating Technology and Education class that I am developing I came across socrative.com which fits the bill of what I was wanting to create.At this point the website is free.

Review:
I spent a few minutes testing out the features of socrative they seem to be well thought out and worked just fine on my desktop and iPod.

Pros:
Cheap as in free
Easily add impromptu questions.
Easy for students to login and learn.
Both asynchronous and synchronous quizzes.
Visually simple design

Cons:
Not sure how long the website will be around.
You have to enter all of the questions.

Conclusion:
Great website that I am looking forward to using in my classroom.

Interactive Clock

Here is a resource that I just finished creating to help students explore how to read time on an analog clock. It allows the student to jump to a specific time or increment the time forward or backward by hours, minutes, or seconds.



You may integrate this into your website using the following html code:
<iframe frameborder="1" height="225" src="http://aschool.us/resources/clock.php?size=200" width="500"></iframe>

Please feel free to leave any questions, improvement suggestions, etc.. in the comments below.

For all your random needs

I just finished adding a new random feature to the list of programs that are available at aschool.us
For your convenience here is a description to each of the random programs that are currently available:

• Random Student Selector
  Given a list of names it will randomly select a name. You can continue to select names as long as you want. The program will attempt to favor names that haven't been picked but repeats can occur.
  
• Random Student Selector Flash
  This is a flash based version of the previous program. One advantage of this version is that names can be added while selecting names. This can be an advantage for students that come in late.
  
• Random Group Generator
  The random group generator can divide up students into a specific number of groups or specific sizes of groups. You have the option of either maximizing the group size or attempting to keep them balanced.
  
• Random Group Mixer
  The random group mixer takes two lists of names and pairs names in each group together. If one group is larger than the other then some pairs will include more than two names.