HSED422/MSED456 Tools for Teachers
This is a list of some of the materials that I have learned of while
working with teachers and educational software from 1992-2005. While
I've tried to be as complete and correct as possible, some information
may be outdated and some may be missing.
Geometry Software
- The
Geometer's Sketchpad, Key
Curriculum Press -- This may be the cheapest and most popular
geometry software, developed by math educators for math education.
Key Curriculum Press also sells textbooks to use with this and
workbooks and materials for using Sketchpad to teach various topics --
for example, perspective drawing, circle geometry, and tesselations.
- Cabri Geometry II, Texas Instruments -- This geometry software was
first developed in France, then purchased by TI. It has an easy to
use "select what you want to do, then select what you want to do it
to" interface.
- Cinderella, Springer Verlag -- This is a very
elegant piece of software that runs on almost all operating systems.
It was developed by mathematicians for mathematicians. It supports
spherical and hyperbolic geometry but does not have the same
supporting material for use in schools that The Geometer's Sketchpad
has.
- The Geometric Supposer, Sunburst Communications -- I
believe this is the original geometry software package. I have never
used it.
- Tom Snyder Productions produces Tessellation Exploration, which teaches transformations and tessellations.
Publishers of Interest to Math Teachers
- Dale Seymour -- Publishes
many posters and black-line masters for use in teaching mathematics.
- Key Curriculum Press -- Publishes The Geometer's Sketchpad and other math teaching materials, especially geometry materials.
Manipulatives
- Polydron -- Plastic triangles, squares, pentagons and hexagons that link together to form tilings or polyhedra.
- Lenart Spheres -- Transparent plastic spheres for use in teaching spherical geometry (one type of non-Euclidean geometry).
- Zometool -- (Expensive) plastic ball-and-rod system for
constructing polyhedron models and molecular models.
Graphing Calculators
- Casio
- Texas Instruments -- TI also sells "Calculator Based Laboratories"
that will collect data on things like distance and temperature and
route that data to students' calculators.
Educational Software
Algebra Software
- Graphmatica -- I use
this shareware program to display graphs to my precalculus classes.
- Derive,
Texas Instruments -- Inexpensive symbolic algebra software, used by
Seattle Central Community College in the early 1990's in project based
calculus courses.
- Maple -- This relatively
easy to use package is used by mathematicians and was also used to
create online worksheets for the University of Illinois at Chicago's
Calculus III
labs. Because you can embed equations in text documents and
output Maple documents to HTML files, it is as good for writing
worksheets as it is for working on them.
- Mathematica Wolfram Reserch -- This is a high-powered symbolic algebra program
used by mathematicians and some students. It's about as good at
elementary calculus as Maple.
- Matlab, The Mathworks -- I
believe this is software for numerically solving equations. In other
words, it is good at generating and processing lists of data.
- GNU Octave -- This is an
inexpensive piece of software that can do most of the same things
Matlab does.
- TeX The math typesetting software traditionally used by mathematicians.
- MathType Equation editors for web pages and documents.
- Scientific WorkPlace/Scientific Word Mathematical word processing, LaTeX typesetting, and computer algebra.
- Maple Math software with built-in typesetting features.
Image Processing
- imagoWEB was free "image conversion" software which I use to
convert images in odd formats (.bmp, .emf) to formats for use in a web
page (.jpg, .gif). You may still be able to find it online.
Other
- Microsoft Excel -- You can do a lot with a spreadsheet;
spreadsheets include functions from statistics, graphing capabilities,
and the ability to program in equations. I use Excel to teach Riemann
Sums in my Calculus II classes.
- OpenOffice Spreadsheet -- OpenOffice is a freeware
competitor of Microsoft Office.
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