Showing posts with label Geogebra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geogebra. Show all posts

Getting the word out on GeoGebra

Maria Droujkova has done some great work putting together some Elluminate sessions on Math 2.0... and she has more to come. On Saturday the 26th she had Markus Hohenwarter, the father of GeoGebra and the chief developer Michael Borcherds on for an hour discussing the past, present and future of GeoGebra. She recorded the session and it's available online.
What surprises me is that I still run in to teachers that have never heard of GeoGebra -- here you have free, open-source math software that almost any computer can run, it's multi-lingual, it's being used worldwide at all levels and has thousands of lesson plans and activities available on its wiki. And yet today I spoke to two Masters students who had never heard of it.
In Ontario, it's problematic since we (well, public and Catholic schools) have software purchased for them by the province and that set includes Geometer's Sketchpad. Now, GSP is an extraordinary program and we owe a great deal to Key Curriculum Press and Nick Jackiw but the development and growth of GeoGebra is a reflection of our brave new world -- collaboration on a global scale, the harnessing of our energies to support people we will never meet. What I do in my classroom can be given (instantaneously) to a classroom in Thailand, Kenya or Uruguay... and vice versa.
So how do we spread the word more effectively? How do we ensure that every preservice and practising teacher knows not only of its existence but also the community already formed?
And, most importantly, how can we port it on to an iPhone? :)
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Putting MapleTA into Wikispaces

Having looked through the posts on Maple Primes, I found a suggestion to insert MapleTA assignments into webpages. So, I flipped over to Wikispaces and tried it out. A little bit of detective work on the page locations, I got it to work.

Since you can set MapleTA assignments to be anonymous, MapleTA will merely produced the questions and not record anything in the gradebook. Using the EMBED tool and the code below students can practice at whim:
Remember of course, to change the square brackets to the corresponding angle brackets!

[IFRAME SRC="http://server/mapleta/modules/test.Test?className=classname&testName=testname" TITLE="MapleTA" WIDTH='100%' HEIGHT=600][/IFRAME]

This follows closely on the heels of embedding GeoGebra into Wikispaces:

[applet name="ggbApplet" code="geogebra.GeoGebraApplet" archive="geogebra.jar" codebase="http://www.geogebra.org/webstart/3.2/" width="884" height="612" id="ggbApplet"]
[param name="filename" value="http://wikiname.wikispaces.com/file/view/yourfile.ggb"]
[/applet]

You first have to upload the yourfile.ggb to your Wikispaces, then embed the code using their widget button. You can change the width and height values and you have to change the YOURFILE name but that's about it.

This opens up a lot of interesting possibilities and I'm hoping it will encourage a lot more sharing.
I'm switching everything in my courses to Wikispaces this weekend and we'll see how much I can stuff in!