Soundslides is a small application for Windows and Mac OS X that provides a graphical user interface for making flash animations that show a sequence of images timed to a sound track. It looks to be drag and drop, and I will be trying it out shortly.
Based on what I have seen on the transom.org Public Radio Web site, the package looks good. The ‘final sale’ story on Transom was compiled using the Soundslides ‘basic’ version.
Decimal long multiplication is based on the idea that you treat the numbers as whole numbers (thus multiplying them by powers of 10) and then adjust the position of the decimal point afterwards.
The errors that I see include
The feedback for wrong answers in this quiz covers most of those. Please save the quiz pages if you want them, you don’t need to link here unless you have no intranet. When I have completed the series, I’ll pop a page up with easy access to all the quizzes.
Another 10 multiple choice questions, this time on decimal subtraction. I have tried to anticipate some common errors that I have seen many students make over the years, and I have tried to give feedback for each wrong answer that will guide the students onto the right path – these quizzes are meant for formative use.
Common subtraction errors include
I have used quizzes like these on a projector in a teaching room before now as well as for individual study.
10 questions on adding decimals for paper and pencil calculation practice. You can download the .jqz file for direct upload into Moodle or for editing in Hot Potatoes. You can also link to or save the quiz exported as a Web page. The Web page version has been set so as to present the 10 questions in a random order and with each of the four possible answers in a random order each time the page is loaded.
More coming: subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages, fractions and ratio questions. Any donations of modified questions welcome, ideally I want 50 of each category so we can set the quizzes to choose 10 from 50 each time they are loaded.
“A weblog is web-native. It’s the web all the way in. A wiki is a web-native way of hosting collaboration. It’s lightweight, it’s loosely coupled, it’s easy to extend, it’s easy to break down. And it’s not just the surface, like oh, you can just do things in a form. It assumes http is transport. It assumes markup in the coding. RSS is a web-native way of doing syndication. So we’re taking all of these tools and we’re extending them in a way that lets us build new things really quickly.”
‘...the street finds its own uses for things’ – William Gibson, Burning Chrome
‘...the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.’ – William Gibson, NPR interview, November 1999
It is that time of year again – some text I wrote for an online conference on blogging.
Blogging tools provide a simple way for teachers to publish on the Web. The date based metaphor lends itself to publishing a ‘class diary’ for each class or cohort. Categories or tags allow posts to be indexed for later revision, and most blog tools include a free text search function. The comment facility allows students to ask questions that can be answered by the tutor or by other course members, and it is relatively straight forward to provide a form for sending a private message to the tutor of the course.
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I was amazed to find how many of these I have used, starting with the Apple II. Edward Tofslie’s poster shows the changes in the design of successive Apple computers (and other devices). Via daringfireball.