User talk:MathTeacherTony

From Wikiversity

[edit] Sounds good!

Do you have any ideas for how you (and or your students) want to use WV? There have been some interesting projects both here and on Wikibooks over the past couple years. --SB_Johnny ^talk 14:45, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Some ideas for mathematics teaching with wikiversity

Here are some pages which may give you some ideas:

• student's course work/notes:special:prefixindex/User:Egm6322,
• homepage of lecture courses: [1]
• collaborative work: betawikiversity:category:E-Jump Project
• Robert Elliott's School:Film

- Hillgentleman | //\\ |Talk 04:21, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

There's all sorts of other things you could do too... posting lecture plans and notes would be a huge benefit for the next teacher down the road, if you're willing.

Top-of-the-head thought: D.C. certainly has interesting urban geometry/trigonometry with the street layouts, so perhaps the students could write up a mathematical tour guide? --SB_Johnny ^talk 10:28, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

Just open your fantasy.--Juan de Vojníkov 20:22, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Copyrights, videos, etc.

Hi Tony. Not sure what you mean by copyrights... just to be sure you know: everything on wikiversity is "copyleft", meaning it's free for anyone to use once you add it to this site.

Videos would be a great idea. I'll try to find someone on commons to talk you through it, but the three things you need to keep in mind is that they'll have to be licensed compatibly with our license, they should be in an "open source" format like .ogg, and if your students appear in the video, you'll need their parents' permission. This actually came up on Wikibooks last week as well, so I'll try t get a resource started up as an easy reference.

The "Jump" links were from Hillgentleman, not me, but I'm sure he can answer any questions about that.

BTW, if you log in, you can easily "sign your comments" by adding 4 tildes after your post (like this: ~~~~). That makes it easier for people to jump back to your talk page. --SB_Johnny ^talk 13:37, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Also, you can not copyright an idea. WAS 4.250 02:26, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

OK, started a resource here... hopefully we'll get some feedback from the people on commons :-). If you have more questions or if content added to that page isn't clear, please speak up on the talk page. --SB_Johnny ^talk 11:51, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] More on copyrights and copylefts

I can fully support the idea of "copyleft" here at Wikiversity. To that end, if I can contribute something worthwhile, I will. But I don't have enough of the resources, material and content to generate worthwhile video on my own. Now, part of my objective is to contribute good video or audio to the educational community. But to do so really requires the help of others. In my case, I'm talking about help from other teachers and students. To make that happen, I'm going to need permission from my school principal.

And, as I mention in SB Johnny's newly-created Copyright page [2], to create any worthwhile video requires that the other individuals involved grant their permission.

So. . . as they used to say on TV, "Stay tuned."

MathTeacherTony 13:51, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Algebra II Teaching Videos Now Available

Hello, there, wikiversity teachers and students. For what it's worth, I've added some videos to my YouTube account, most dealing with "completing the square" for quadratics. If I need to do something to make them available here, too, please tell me what to do and I'll do so. I plan to add more videos and to boost my production quality as time goes by but, for now, it's a start.

Any and all criticism or contributions are welcome.

--MathTeacherTony 11:24, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Hello. Just for your information, apart from a simple link, there actually is an embed video extension of the mediawiki software; It is not enabled on wikiversity, but it might be on wikia. Hillgentleman | //\\ |Talk 12:47, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

[edit] I'm back after a long hiatus. . .

The school year is over and I'm preparing to teach Algebra II for Summer School, and pre-calculus for the 2009-2010 academic year. I've continued to add videos to my McKinley Tech dot org Web page, and I'm exploring more relationships to develop online instruction opportunities. Now, I have a question I want to ask the general Wikiversity community.

How can we make online instruction opportunities a success?

My own experience is that the saying "You can lead a horse to water but can't make it drink" is more true than the Field of Dreams phrase, "If you build it, they will come."

I had hoped the reverse would be true but, apparently it's not. Or, perhaps I expected more students to flock to my Web pages and to study the instructional videos I had created. In fact, I even offered extra points on their final exam grades if they watched the videos and posted a constructive comment. Out of my 50-plus students, only a few took advantage of the opportunity. Maybe that's the way it will always be.

Does anyone out there have similar experiences? Dissimilar experiences? Constructive advice?

Thanks in advance,

MathTeacherTony 18:23, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Creating the model class room for online instruction

I'm a true believer in the value of online instruction, but I know there's a "disconnect" between the information that's available to students and their own decision to use this information to their advantage. I say this from direct experience with my own students at McKinley Tech High School in Washington, D.C.

The trick, I guess, is to understand how to motivate more students to use online-instruction opportunities.

To encapsulate this dilemma with two catch phrases: Teaching students with online instruction is more a case of "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink" than it is "If you build it, they will come."

I'm teaching Algebra II for summer school and I plan to put this dilemma to the test. I also plan to make my classes a lab for on-line instruction. At a minimum, I plan to capture as much of the in-class instruction as useful video content to post for later review. Would it be more valuable as streaming video? I'm not so sure.

Stay tuned. . .

MathTeacherTony 14:40, 21 June 2009 (UTC)