10 Totally Ridiculous Combo Gadgets

(picture: 10 Totally Ridiculous Combo Gadgets)

Since we all like gadgets, I thought that I would write about this. I was just browsing the internet today, and I found this interesting article. I was a little surprised at first, just because of some of the combinations. But then again, new gadgets are always coming about, that somehow people use and I don't understand. So the article that I came across was called 10 Totally Ridiculous Combo Gadgets, and if you are like me you were also curious. The picture that I first saw was the one above, and I was like, what the heck!?!? Who would use that and why was it even created. I just wonder where people come up with these crazy ideas. So here are the gadgets, go to the website to read more about them. I know you will, because they are that crazy!!

1. The Taser Music Player Holster.

2. The USB Watch

3. The Gift Card and Gadget Combo

4. Mouse and VoIP Phone

5. The FM Radio Toaster

6. The iBreath with FM Transmitter

7. The USB Hub and Thermometer

8. The Rear-View LCD Screen

9. MP3 Massager

10. The Toilet Paper Dispensing iPod Dock (this is my personal favorite)

So if you are having difficulties thinking of gifts for your loved ones, check these out and see if they will work for you. My guess is that they probably won't. But they are still funny and interesting.

List blogging and Life Blogging

Top 10 Stress Relief

(picture: Lisa Burrack)

These are some stress relief tips from Natural Stress Relief, mostly because finals week is coming up soon.

1. Keep Positive

2. Just Say NO!

3. Don't Sweat It

4. Don't Forget to Breathe

5. Make Yourself a Priority

6. Laughter and Tears

7. Meditation

8. Massage

9. Music

10. Excercise

If all else fails, eat Mint Oreo Cookies!! This is my own personal addition.

List Blogging

Second Life

(picture: Math in Second Life)

So tonight I spent a lot of time in second life and searching for math stuff on second life online. And low and behold I found some cool stuff. There was so much 3D modeling that I would not even think it was imaginable. There was a mobius band, Fibonacci stuff, and all kinds of other stuff!! It was crazy. There was this one island that I found like 5 different places that had cool math stuff. I was disappointed that I couldn't find some of the stuff, but that's ok. There were pictures of them on this Math in Second Life website. Check out the other pictures for sure. I thought that the picture of the torus would have come in handy when I was taking Geometric Transformations because we talked about all kinds of Geometric structures. I even went to see if there was any cool wallpaper patterns because we talked about those too in that class. I know that I am a true math geek when I look at something like a mobius band and a torus and think they are way cool or when I look at a wallpaper pattern and can tell you the group it is in classified by the rotations, translations, miracles, and so on. If I were to go and use SecondLife I would now have specific places that I would go and show students!! So I guess that there is a little more you can do in it compared to Google Sketchup.

(Life Blogging, Repost)

Remember When...

(picture: Hawaii Internet and Technology Crimes Unit)

I often have difficulties blogging about different topics, possibly because I got into blogs when I was in high school and then realized that they are really really time consuming. That is probably my biggest thing with blogs. But that's not what I want to write about today. I wanted to reflect on what I have learned through my technology career I guess I will call it. I guess the biggest thing is that I know what will probably work and what probably won't work in my math classroom. I have learned about a lot of different things along the way that is really some neat stuff. It is difficult to really get connected with something if I don't think I would use it in the classroom. The programs that I have started to like through the years are: Excel, Google Sketchup, Geometer's Sketchpad, and Inspiration. There might be some other ones too, but I can't think of them right now. I just know that the technology road has been interesting and difficult at times, somehow I still stuck with it. It is just amazing to me the knowledge that a person acquires after so many years!! I would have never been able to do half of the things that I have done with technology 5 years ago.

Review Blog is what I am going to call this one, even though it is more of a reflection.

Math Games

(picture: www.coolmath-games.com)

I was looking online and found some really neat math games. I haven't looked at them all, but I did find some that were neat ones to check out.

Coolmath-games

Try the one called Math lines: X-Factor, this one has to do with different multiples of numbers. I think it would be good for younger students.

Math Playground

Try the one called Locate the Aliens, this one has to do with the coordinate plane and ordered pairs. Another one was called Making Change, this one you have to give the customer the proper change. Math Millionaire was also a fun game that had a variety of math questions.

Primary Games

Try the one called The Multiplication Game, it was a little difficult at first, you can move both the bottom and the top arrow to get the multiplication of the numbers. This was a pretty good thinking game.

I am going to say that this is a link blog or kind of first learning.

Photo's of New Technology

Flexible, full-color OLED display

(photo: www.pinktentacle.com)

Tools for the Visually Impaired

This one is actually from a blog. Beryl Plimmer focuses her research on Human-Computer Interaction. There are a lot of different things on her blog, I would recommend looking at it. I find that this would be helpful if a teacher would have a student who needed some extra help.

(photo: www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~beryl/)

Sixth Sense

(photo: www.blog.subscribermail.com)

Ultrasound Technology

(photo: www.medgadget.com)

This is a Photo Blog. I thought that these were pretty neat new technology. I did like how in Erin's blog she talked about wiki's and blogs. Kind of touching on when people should use a blog or a wiki.

Podcast

Technology Talks podcast. It is a podcast on kind of how to make a podcast.

Learning/Teaching Opportunities through Virtual Worlds

(photo from: www.weblogsinc.com)

This last week we spent the class in SecondLife. It was an interesting experience. I was told that I was good at it, even though it was like my 3rd time on it. I do think that it is an interesting thing to have to communicate with other people from all over the world. I don't know if I know really all of the point for it as an educational use. Sure it's cool that you can fly and you can change your avatar to look like whatever you like, but still...

Looking at it from a mathematical standpoint, I don't know if I would use something like SecondLife in the classroom. I did like the fact that you could make the different shapes and such, but so can other programs like Google-Sketchup. I think my problem with something like SecondLife is that there are other things that are not educational on there. I guess what sticks out in my mind is the fact that essentially anything could happen there, and not good things. If I were to teach my students about shapes, then I would use the Sketchup because you don't have the problems of the avatars and what could happen in not safe areas.

I do think that SecondLife could be used to possibly build a house for an educational aspect, but I don't know. I would think that you could do the same thing in Sketchup to an extent and it would be a little safer.

(Detractor Blogging, Life Blogging)

The new Twitter...Birddi

(picture from Facternet.com)

The other day I was watching the Ellen DeGeneres Show. On October 14 she was talking about Birddi, which if you have heard about this it is like Twitter, but it is all in Spanish. Which I didn't know what to think about it at first, but after a while I feel like it is a good idea. Ass you can see the layout is basically the same as Twitter, just in Spanish. Which I think that it is a good idea to have something like this for people who don't speak English. So right now, I am looking to see if there are any other types of Twitters out there for a multitude of languages.

So apparently there are a lot of Twitter spin offs. I found another blog that was talking about Birddi being a spin off, which I also found that there were some other ones too. The blog was called Facternet.

If people like Twitter so much, I would have imagined that they would have it for people all over the world and not just in English.

I am going to say that this is an Announcement or Link blogging, since I hadn't heard about it until the other day.

Virtual Worlds

I think that the most that I have heard about virtual worlds is from Second Life. I don't have a Second Life account yet. What I do know about it is that it's a way for people from around the world to connect with each other. People can decide what they want to do, ranging from shopping, working, and just talking with other people. I see it as a way to communicate with a 3D version of how you want to make yourself. It looks interesting, I don't know if I would use Second Life in my classroom. I would have to think about that a bit more.

I also found a Virtual Worlds Review. Which this looked good because it listed just about every kind of virtual world that there is out there. Some of them look like they are free, but not all of them.

Another things that would be a virtual world would be The Sims. But I don't think that you can communicate with other people, you just create your own world. There is an online version of The Sims.



Something else that is exciting is that I have been using a Promethean Smartboard at my Level 3 Field Experience. It would be nice to learn more about that technology, but it is pretty cool and not too bad to use. :)

Getting to know your students

Something that has been popping up in a lot of my classes recently is the concept of getting to know your students and things that happen in their lives. It is important to get to know the students to some extent, as much as they are really willing to share with you as the teacher.

An example that came up in one of my classes was a student who couldn't do a homework problem because it said hamburger or cow in it. The student was from a religion that thinks of cows as sacred animals. The only thing the teacher had to do was rewrite the problem so it wouldn't bother the student.

Something else that came up is knowing the students home-life situation. If the student is homeless, they might not be able to work on homework at night because they don't have electricity. They could be from a divorced family, single parent family, or living with their grandparents.

As teachers we need to know our students. We shouldn't assume what is going on in their lives. It is up to the family though to I guess disclose what information they want to with the teacher and school system.

How I thought that I would do to get to know my students would be to just have them write me a letter or something the first day of school. I was trying to think how I could do something like this by using technology but I couldn't think of anything besides a Google Docs survey. That's about it, just make sure you get to know your students to an extent.

You might be that one person who makes a difference in their lives.

Skype

Recently I have been trying to think about ways to communicate with other people next year. Instead of using all of my cellphone minutes I could use Skype. I have learned that if 2 computers are doing the talking or I guess communicating then it is FREE!!! Which I really like this!!! I will have to look at it more. But I think that this is a great way to communicate with other people. I don't know how I would really use it for a math classroom yet, but I would like to know.

Really, besides Geometer's Sketchpad and Google Sketchup I haven't really been able to think of different programs/technology to use in a math class.

I do like in Nate's blog, Teacher to Teacher, where he talks about when to use Blogs or Wiki's. This I will have to check out more to see if it will be useful in a math class.

Global Opportunities for Learning

One way to make learning globalized would be to use Skype. I have never used it, but it seems like a good idea. I guess I am thinking along the lines of bringing the world of education together. When I say that I think about having a teacher over in Japan talking to another teacher in Iowa or really anywhere in the world. This could be resourceful when looking at learning different languages. It would be a lot better to be able to talk to someone who is a native speaker of the language.

Social Networking in My Life

I have started to get away from a lot of social networking things like msn messenger and aim messenger. I do use them every once and a while, but not like I did when I was in high school and my first 2 years at UNI. Facebook has been my main way of communication with my friends that I don't really see on a daily basis. I do like the Facebook Chat, just because it is like msn or aim messenger. The nice thing about that is that you only need to know the persons name, not their messenger name.

I just realized that Facebook is kind of like a blog...huh...

As much as I rant and rave about Facebook and how much I dislike it, it is probably one of the best ways to interact with friends an family. I would rather talk to a person in person, but that isn't always possible. I am not on the computer really very much just due to my life schedule. I find it difficult to find time to sit down and make time for things like Facebook, msn or aim messenger.

I do like the fact that you can talk with people from all over the world, just like Shu-hsiang stated in her blog The Secret Garden.

Role of Blogging in Education

If I would ever use a blog in a classroom I would use it as a place where I would provide sample problems for math. I would use it as a place where students would be able to ask questions when they are at home. A problem with that is that not all students will have computers or even the internet. I would try to use something else that would be more interactive for answering questions. Possibly a Google Doc or something where multiple students and the teacher could have a certain amount of time to ask questions.

In the Cool Cat Teacher Blog, Vicki Davis talked about how turning in papers could be done on a blog. I would think that would be interesting to do that for a class, but at the same time, like she stated, it would be difficult to make comments for the students. I like seeing the various comments where I need to fix a mistake on the paper.

I don't know if I would use a blog in the classroom, I would find it difficult with math.