Welcome to our Qwest Foundation Grant MathLincs page.

(8-14-07) Greetings teammates.  I have been trying to line up some classrooms for our project.  I currently have a class in Florida, Tennessee and Ottawa.  I have contacted all of my old international schools plus several other international schools.  I have posted the project on e-pals, GlobalSchoolhouse.net, GlobalEducationCollaborative.ning.com and the Discovery Educators Network.  (Just did this, so I expect we will hear from others. ) After our last meeting, I created a moodle class with the descriptions for the project we planned at the meeting.  This is what I have posted for others to see.  As I am just learning Moodle, I have been playing around with what can be done.  I just sent the address to someone I met last week who is an expert at Moodle.  Hopefully he can give me some good tips. Not to step on Michael's toes, I have started working on the Probability and Statistics strand, just because that is what we will be starting with right away and I wanted the teachers who might be interested to see what we are planning.  I have shared with the teachers that we will be meeting on August 29 and will firm up the activities and dates at that time.  But for now, you can take a look at what I have done.  http://www.t56linc.com/moodle  There are things that I know I want to add, change or improve, but I don't want to go too far without input from others. Last week at Berkeley was VERY INTENSE.  We worked from 8 am to at least 9 pm every night and then continued with projects to the wee hours of the morning each night.  I came home exhausted but I made a lot of great connections and learned a lot. Hopefully my next week of instruction will be even a fraction as useful. Looking forward to meeting on Aug. 29 to get our schedule worked out.  (Not really looking forward to being back, but looking forward to knowing a little bit more about schedules and plans.  Looks like I have bitten off a pretty huge chunk with both our grant and the EETT Grant.  (Didn't realise how much work the second grant was going to be.  Lots more work than goodies.)

I am hoping that we can get the rest of our stuff ordered during our Aug. 29 meeting.  I might try to get the Airliners in the work before that time since we have already agreed to that.  Met a lot of people using SmartBoards at the conference.  The software that comes with both the Airliners and SmartBoards is pretty amazing.  Just wish we weren't so busy, so hard to find time to learn all of these new toys. 

(martha)

The following were taken during our July 19 meeting.  I am going to post the ideas in the appropriate place as well.

Qwest Grant:

•   Wiki 
•   Moodle   
•   Think.com 
•   Probability and Statistics--We will focus on vocabulary.  Participating classes will be given a list of vocabulary words.  Each class will then prepare a presentation defining each word.  Classes could create podcasts, vodcasts, videos, draw pictures, create power points, etc.  All entries will be posted on the Mathlincs Wiki.  Students will compare definitions generated by different classes.
•  Geometry--Math Trails--photos of architecture in their location..  Take a picture of some architectural place or natural object.  Create questions and use white board movies to solve show how they would solve the problem. These photos and problems would be posted to the Wiki.

•   Measurement--Share a photo or list items in a typical meal you would eat in your area.  (Emphasise dishes that represent the culture of your area.) Then have students in each class make a list of foods readily grown in a 100 mile radius of their home.  Challenge each class to create a 100 mile diet recipe for their region.  Go to the grocery store and choose 10 produce items.  Figure out the location of where this food is from, map all of the items on GoogleEarth.  List distance from your hometown in both miles and kilometers. (extensions:  figure out the carbon imprint of these food items.  Compare the carbon imprint of locally grown foods to those grown in other parts of the world.
•   Algebraic Sense: Provide Jeopardy template.  Challenge each participating class to create a review game with each of the strands.  (these games will be posted on our Wiki to share.)
   
  In addition to the stranded projects, we want to have Skype partner experts who we poll throughout the year about how they use different aspects of math.
  Teresa is also interested in having students create math podcasts that could be shared online and also perhaps on the local radio.
•   NCCE proposal   
•   Kathy Dorr : Sept. 15 We will meet in Michael's room for our class on podcasts, wikis and blogs.
•   Budget :

We agreed to purchase 4 Smart Airliners.  We will purchase 3 video cameras.  If Gracie is with us, she will get Mary's doc camera.  Teresa will get Mary's projector.  We will pass along Gracie's old doc camera to Bonnie and Teresa will pass along her projector to Bonnie.  We will pass along another doc camera to Kris and Kim.  (Funding for a projector will need to come from another source.  If we have a new 5th grade Slingerland teacher, they will get Mary's doc camera and projector.  We can still pass along Martha's old doc cam, but projectors will be needed for those who receive the hand me downs.

To address the grant we need to:

• concentrate on number strands
• use a variety of technologies
• interact with other schools

Been reading about the 100 mile diet.  Trying only to eat foods grown within 100 miles of your home.  I know that I am far from being able to do this.  But this might be a cool tie to math, science, social studies and our healthy schools project.  We could have schools list the types of foods grown within 100 miles of their location.  We could go to a grocery store and record distance traveled for different items of produce.  We could compare the carbon imprint of a food grown locally to a processed food.  Etc.  This would tie in to Teresa's idea of finding our Carbon Imprint or Ecological Footprint.  I think that this would be an interesting project to compare with students in other parts of the country and the world.  I don't know if we could do this with every strand, but it would be neat to follow this global idea throughout our projects. (Martha) (7-19-07)

Just added a video I found about making Wikis.  I posted it on the page about Wikis (7-17-07)

They just added a spreadsheet feature to the wiki so I put our working budget on the budget page.  I did have it formulated to total and also show what was left but that isn't working so I will have to fix it.  Also, speaking of the budget, I heard back from Todd Cunningham with a quote for the Airliners.  Should we try to order them while there are still people in the office or just wait until Fall?  Working on some ideas for the project.  Trying to connect with Teresa's idea about our Ecological Footprint.  Was thinking of a study of food packaging.  We could work with ratio and percent.  We could use GoogleEarth and a trip to the grocery store to research the distance different foods travel to get to us and the percentage of food grown locally in the store. We could do a mathtrail podcast with geometric features.  We could pose questions at each stop and then have a corresponding whiteboard movie showing how to solve the problem. Also trying to learn the Moodle features.  Lots of cool things we can do with that if I can figure it out. I think that it would be great if you make a connection in Italy. I will try to do the same in Ecuador, but I am afraid schools will be out when I am there.  I have found some more sights for projects including Think.com.  I have heard from several teachers through GlobalSchoolHouse.  (Martha) (7-5-07)

Haven't checked the Moodle out yet, will in a minute.  But you know I am heading to Italy for a few weeks in December to study the arts and Italian.  I will try and hook up with a school there beforehand and then go visit the school when I am there.  I will be in Venice and Florence mostly.  I was also thinking about just making contact directly with schools listed with ISS or something, what do you all think??  Teresa

Working on a Moodle (online class) for our project.  Still not quite sure what I am doing.  You can take a look at the Mathlincs Moodle.

Also, I have started looking for classes with both e-pals and Global Schoolhouse Net.  Hopefully we will get some takers this way.  If not, I will e-mail some international teachers I know.

Love the idea of having the kids create a logo.  Also, I'd like to start thinking about using podcasting.  One thing I could do is get the script for next year and the songs for next year, made by our kids, on a podcast so kids could start memorizing lines.  Possibly we could put some monologues on podcasts.  I'm thinking about creating poetry podcasts.  What about book review podcasts??  Basically creating our own weekly radio station?  With math questions of the week, poems, This Day in History, etcetera . . . .  tv

These are great ideas.  Check out the links on the podcasting page.  Tony Vincent does this thing called Radio Willow Web with his class  Another guy has done vocabucast which are very Marzanoey...:)   Audacity is a free program you can download on PCs.  It works like Garage Band on the newer Macs.  You can edit audio and add multiple tracks.  Then you can save the files as mp3s which can be made into podcasts with a program like podomatic.  I used gcast when I was in Spokane and made podcasts by cell phone.  We might have to work with Ed to make sure the programs we need aren't blocked by the firewall.  Ed has been pretty willing to make things work for educational purposes.  The only problem is if someone in the district is abusing the program, then it has to be blocked for everyone.  We can definitely do inhouse podcasts where we post and share mp3 files. 

Martha= Blue

Teresa = Green

Michael= Red

Check out the Rock Our World site on the Video Conferencing page.  Very cool!

We can see recent edits from the sidebar.  But maybe we could alert people where to look on our front page as well. 

You now