Thursday, November 19, 2009

WebcamMax FTW...

As a high school mathematics teacher with 11 years of experience, I have heard every excuse in the world from students about their inability to meet the expectations of the course. Believe it or not, often my class is not at the top of their priority list.

I also realize that my subject can be a large source of frustration for my students, as they desire to do well in the course, but for whatever reason, they are unsuccessful and simply cannot solve the problems. It doesn’t help that we only have 45 minutes per class period in most cases, and I often have classes of 25 or more, which provides me with less than 2 minutes per student on average to work one-on-one with any particular student. Clearly, an extension of the classroom is needed to better serve students.

I have been interested in screencasting and the use of online video for over a year now, and I’ve been looking for tools to be able to hold live review sessions on the web for my students. Last night I started using WebcamMax to help set up a UStream.TV show that I am planning to use to hold online review sessions with my high school math students, and tested it a bit today while at the Illinois Education and Technology Conference (IETC or Il-EdTech). I must say I'm very pleased with the results and I hope students take advantage of this exciting technology.

You can see the result of my most recent test below:



For this project I used WebcamMax to feed into UStream, and OneNote as my platform to demonstrate the mathematics, and I found setup to be extremely easy. When I installed WebcamMax, I was prompted by the program to set up WebcamMax for the most common web apps that would use a webcam; one of which was Ustream. It all worked quickly and flawlessly.

The next item was to set up WebcamMax to show my screen, rather than an actual web cam. Again, the settings were very straight forward:



One of the things I was concerned about was how much of a hog the program would be on my system, given that I am using a relatively slow performing Tablet PC. I was pleasantly surprised that my system continued to perform well, even with UStream, OneNote, and WebcamMax all running concurrently.

I also was worried that there would be a significant delay between the time I wrote pen strokes on the computer, and when it was received by my clients watching the show. In testing it with my colleagues the delay was only a couple of seconds, which is perfectly reasonable. There was also no tablet pen lag while using OneNote, even though I had the other two apps running at the same time.

I highly recommend WebcamMax for use with solutions to problems such as mine, and as a general all-purpose piece of software for your webcam. You can download a free trial of the software at http://www.webcammax.com.

Friday, August 21, 2009

New School Year is Coming!

I'll be back and better than ever next week with regular updates. Welcome back students!

Friday, June 5, 2009

Intro to Algebra Practice Exam Solutions

Please click here for the solutions to the exam review problems from Friday.

See you next week for exams. Please feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

Precalc Extra Review Materials

Here is the complete list of practice exam problems I have, with the solutions at the end:

Semester 2 Exam Review Problems and Solutions (45 page pdf)

Good luck on the quiz tomorrow, and the exam. :)

Monday, June 1, 2009

Class Summaries

Precalc

9.2 - Arithmetic Sequences. Notes are here:

Do assignments 3 and 4 for tomorrow...but do EVERY OTHER EVEN.

Intro to Algebra

First day of exam review. For homework - go to the Quia reviews and do the Chapter 4 All at Once problems. Remember that you need to submit your answers online and bring a sheet with your scratch work for credit.

Computer Science 2

Work on the Sporacle programs.

Intro to Algebra Quia Link

Here is the link to my online quizzes for exam review:

QUIA PAGE

It is also posted at the right for your convenience.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Precalc Info and Class Summaries

I'm going to go in a different order today...since the precalc info is going to dominate today's post.

Intro to Algebra

Chapter 7 Test. No new HW.

Computer Science 2

Underclassmen - Work on the Sporacle project we talked about in class yesterday.

Seniors - Exam review day and questions.


Now that that's out of the way....

Precalc - Summaries and info regarding next week -

Seniors - Today was your day to ask questions in class regarding the final exam. Make sure you report to the Library Classroom both Monday and Tuesday of next week to take your exam. If you have any last minute questions, I will try to arrive at school at around 7am to answer them.

I anticipate having your grades done sometime on Wednesday. I don't know if they will be ready by the time I see you, so if they are not ready by then, just send me an email later that day or Thursday.

Juniors - Work on the 9.1 Review Sheet given in class. I will try to post a link to this later today.

Regarding the schedule for next week, I'm going to change things around a bit...I think I have a solution that works best for everyone.

Monday and Tuesday - We're going to to push hard and finish both 9.2 and 9.3 on these days. These are by far going to be the toughest in-class days for the Juniors left in the year, so please come prepared. You may want to read up on these two sections to make the two days easier.

Wednesday is going to be the senior send-off and the first day of exam review for Juniors.

Thursday will be another exam review day.

Friday I will be out of the building...so on THIS day we will have a QUIZ on sections 9.1-9.3. I will have to make comments regarding this quiz online once it is graded, since we will not be able to go over it in class.

Then next week will be the final exam.

I appreciate everyone's flexibility regarding these days...I know I'm not making it easier by being out on that Friday, but I'm working around it as best I can.

On a side note...I'm taking a quick look at the projects and they really look nice. I hope the quality of the mathematics matches the asthetics. :)

If I haven't said it enough - I really appreciate your hard work this year. I know that the course (and I) have been difficult at times...but mark my words it will pay off.

Take care.