Ron's Place

The academic field of mathematics can be divided into theoretical mathematics and applied mathematics.  Most beginning students find that applied mathematics can at least demonstrate how mathematics can be used.  One application is the field of aerodynamics and how airplanes fly.  The lift equation provides an excellent example of using basic algebra to determine wing size for an airplane.  A slide show of airplane pictures can generate interest in the subject.

Photo Credits
1. F-15 by Ken Middleton – http://www.flickr.com/photos/34948319@N03/4132598490
2. F-16 by AV8NLVR – http://www.flickr.com/photos/28042007@N07/4133245072
3. F-117 by Neil – http://www.flickr.com/photos/neil28860/4120140075
4. F-22 by Laurie Hughes – http://www.flickr.com/photos/laurie-hughes/4131368131
5. B-1 by PhoenixFlyer – http://www.flickr.com/photos/batesy617/4121860946
6. B-2 by David Pham – http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidpham9115/4034243664

I have a presentation entitled “Will I Ever Use This Calculus” that I have presented to students at several high schools and students at Kennesaw State University.  The first part of the presentation discusses learning theory and shows how a course like calculus enables us to think and reason at the first four levels in the Cognative Domain.  The second part of the presentation shows how some basic calculus and algebra helped me design a flight test program involving safe carriage of a $1,000,000 one-of-a-kind instrumentation pod on the F-4 aircraft.  Flickr presents a resource that will allow me to include aircraft photographs into the presentation.  The photographs are more interesting than just a set of words.  While looking at airplane photographs on Flickr I noticed that many of the stored photographs are not saved in a JPG format.  I was not able to successfully link to those photographs.  I will need to do more research into how I can use all of these wonderful airplane photographs.

Image by:  caribb’s photostream

Creative Commons opens up a wide range of resources for teachers and students.  I was particularly interested in the MIT Open Courseware (OCW) Project.  I found calculus course materials and video lectures that students would use next semester to supplement calculus at any level.  By looking at test reviews and sample tests I could easily see the differences between expectations of students at MIT and students at KSU.  Also the differences between theoretical calculus and applied calculus were apparent.  I plan to refer future students to this online resource.

I share course content with my students on the web through Vista, but have not shared course content on the open web.

Thing 8 – The flexibility of being able to use a wiki to convey course information on pages that cannot be changed by the reader and provide a collaborative format on other pages presents a teaching tool that I will investigate.

I found a wide range of sophistication in the wikis that I reviewed.  Some like Primary Math were very basic which was probably appropriate for the young elementary student.  Others like Code Blue used a great deal of sophistication and multiple links to take advantage of information that is already available.  Math 12V Outcome Portfolio provided excellent teaching content by allowing students to submit explanations of curriculum outcomes as well as sample  problems.  The students were encouraged to prepare short lesson plans that could be used to achieve the curriculum outcome.  Mr. Lee’s tipes for wiki-excellence provide a nice starting place for the students.  He mentioned the use of pbwiki helps to insert plugins to create the math symbology.  The plugins use LaTex which is not an intuitive symbology tool.  The challenge will be to find a more user-friendly symbology tool.  We want the students concentrating on the mathematical concepts and not how to use the symbology tools.

Thing 5

I was amazed at Gary Hayes’ Social Media Counter.  It revealed to me just how uninformed I am concerning the rapid growth in social networking.  Within 117 seconds, 1230 new blogs were posted.  Within 170 seconds, over 409,000,000 emails were sent globally.  I could see that twitter is coming of age, but is  not growing at the pace of blogs.

I look forward to using the feed and reader to investigate mathematics education sites.

Thing 4: The five blogs that I visited were all different in style and purpose.  The two that I enjoyed most were: Questions for One of Our Favorite Authors: Grace Lin and Duck Diaries.  Both blogs encouraged the students to get involved.  The students in one class had the opportunity to see their questions answered by Grace Lin.  It must have been exciting to ask the question and then see the response.  It was almost like talking  directly to the author.  The other class of second graders wrote and then posted their own stories about the missing duck.  I’m sure that this was a lot more fun than just writing the stories.  Both blogs invited creativity.

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