## Small Nudges and Their Impact on Student Success

We get them in our inbox every day – a reminder for the dentist appointment, an alert about a payment from the bank account, or a possible fraudulent charge, and so on. Many of us have become so accustomed to these reminders and alerts that we find ourselves somewhat dependent on them. This led me to wonder if my students… Read more →

## Student engagement and technology apps

Lately, I have been using various technology tools to increase interactivity within the classroom. I have moved toward smartphone apps that can readily engage students.  Here’s my current list: Google Classroom – students can post comments and answer questions in real time Remind – this is a messaging service where I can instantly text message students without knowing their phone… Read more →

## Schedule Virtual Meetings through CourseSites

If you are looking to have a synchronous online meeting with your students, you can easily accomplish that with CourseSites by Blackboard. It is a full featured version of Blackboard and allows free hosting of up to 5 courses. I use it to create a “meetings” course and then use the Live Meetings tool. It’s a full featured online meeting… Read more →

Elementary and middle school students can use Sketchpad activities to learn about relationships between numbers and early concepts of algebra. The following video shows an interesting activity which asks students to figure out the missing values of the shapes by using just their inequality relationships. The downloadable Sketchpad activity as well as related information can be found at: http://dynamicnumber.org/balance__reasoning_with_inequalities Sketchpad… Read more →

## Desmos

Desmos is a powerful online graphing utility. Below is a simple graph made with Desmos. You can click on it and then interact with the graph.

## Math Equations in Google Sites

I use Google Sites for most of my course related materials, since it is part of university’s Google Mail account. MathJax – a system for writing math on the web – does not work with Google Sites, since MathJax uses Javascript.  After some time googling this issue, I found that Google has its own way to enter math. For example,… Read more →

Just type in x^2-y^2 into Google’s search box and you get the saddle figure – and you can move it around as well!  With these types of  ready- to -go aids for graphing, anyone can incorporate serious graphics into teaching and learning math. Click on the image  to see a “live” version of the surface  $$z=x^2-y^2$$.