how to integrate math and computers
#make money #get a job #plan to work #math #calculate
Do you
need to make money?
plan to have a job?
How much money will you need to earn?
This hourly rate calculator to give you a guide based on your costs, number of billable hours and desired profit. It is a simple tool for you to play with. Remember your hourly rate should always take into account factors like market demand, industry standards, skill level and experience - things that unfortunately we can't put into a calculator! Use these calculations as a guide and then modify to suit your circumstance and conditions. It will take you about 5-20 minutes to complete depending on how much attention you give each calculation.
Financial Literacy
USA Today - Money - Calculators
Offers a host of financial calculators found under the following topics: Mortages, Autos, Credit, Retirement, and Savings. Answers questions like how much you can borrow, what your loan payments will be, how depreciation will effect the value of your car, should you convert your IRA to a Roth IRA, how much it will take to save for a car or home, and much more!
FUN
Pi
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375
10582097494459230781640628620899862803482534211706
79821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081
28481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381
96442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190
91456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412
7372458700660631
This page contains a Flash video. To view it requires that the Flash plugin is installed and Javascript enabled.
XKCD A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Change girls attitutdes towards computers.
Getting Really Young Girls Into Math
This is a great web site with lots of hands-on activities
Cool gamer sites for the grrls :-)
Great math and technology integration lessons
Visual Math Learning - excellent resource
Geometry
Geometry Step-by-Step from the Land of the Incas provides an eclectic mix of sound, science, and Incan history in order to raise students' interest in Euclidean geometry. Visitors will find geometry problems, proofs, quizzes, puzzles, quotations, visual displays, "scientific speculation", Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Lost City of the Incas, Nazca Lines, the Quipu, the Lord of Sipan, Caral: the oldest civilization in the Americas, and more. On July 7th, 2007, Machu Picchu was voted as one of New Open World Corporation's New Seven Wonders of the World. Site created and maintained by Antonio Gutierrez.
- I would like to inform you about a new free on-line animated geometry illustration of: "Generalizing Van Aubel Theorem using Duality by Michael de Villiers" in 15 steps
- De Gua's Theorem, Pythagorean theorem in 3-D
- Interactive Mindmap of "Principles and Standards for School of Mathematics, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics NCTM" Principles and Standards for School Mathematics describes a future in which all students have access to rigorous, high-quality mathematics instruction, including four years of high school mathematics.
- RSS Feed
Geometry
Along with their substantial instructional resources, the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) has worked to place valuable mathematical materials online to aid both teachers and students. Find links to materials that can be used to teach students about the fundamentals of geometry, including plane motion, polyhedras, symmetry, and tessellations.
Seemless Curriculum Ideas for Geometry
Explore the sky in Google Earth 4.2
Practice
Math Practice Site
Practice makes perfect, and IXL makes math practice fun. With unlimited math questions in more than 1,000 topics, students improve their skills and confidence and always have new challenges to meet. Click a grade below to get started!
The math work sheet site
create an endless supply of printable math worksheets. The intuitive interface gives you the ability to easily customize each worksheet to target your student's specific needs. Every worksheet is created when you request it, so they are different every time.
Practice/reinforcing concepts (and useful for students who need repetition to get something down).
National Library of VirtualManipulative
Search for the Greek God and Goddess - Teaching Ratios
Math - Grades 5, 6, 8
The State of State Math Standards 2005
Volume / Area / Length / Weight / Temperature Converter
Finding Math Hard? Blame Your Right Parietal Lobe
Source: University College London
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070322132931.htm
Science Daily — Scientists have, for the first time, induced difficulties with mathematics (dyscalculia) in subjects who normally find math easy. The study, which finds that the right parietal lobe is responsible for dyscalculia, potentially has implications for diagnosis and management through remedial teaching.
Dyscalculia is just as prevalent in the population as dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder -- around 5% of the population is affected. However, dyscalculia has not been given the same attention as other disorders and the underlying brain dysfunction causing dyscalculia is still a mystery. It is hoped that this study will provide a better understanding of the condition and lead to better diagnosis and treatment.
Dr Roi Cohen Kadosh, of the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said: "This is the first causal demonstration that the parietal lobe is the key to understanding developmental dyscalculia. Most people process numbers very easily -- almost automatically -- but people with dyscalculia do not. We wanted to find out what would happen when the areas relevant to maths learning in the right parietal lobes were effectively knocked out for several hundred milliseconds. We found that stimulation to this brain region during a maths test radically impacted on the subjects' reaction time.
"This provides strong evidence that dyscalculia is caused by malformations in the right parietal lobe and provides sold grounds for further study on the physical abnormalities present in dyscalculics' brains. It's an important step to the ultimate goal of early diagnosis through analysis of neural tissue, which in turn will lead to earlier treatments and more effective remedial teaching."
Functions Grapher [Macromedia Flash Player]
Discussing functions can be a tricky endeavor, but having a handy interactive way to talk about functions can relieve a great deal of stress. As part of the Mathematical Sciences Digital Library, this Functions Grapher application is designed to let users enter one or two functions. After doing so, users can trace along either one with coordinates shown dynamically changing at all times. The application was created by Professor Barbara Kaskosz of the University of Rhode Island, and it can be used by students in algebra, pre-calculus, or calculus courses. Of course, educators may wish to use it in their classrooms for illustrative purposes and they can also pass along to students who might find the very idea of functions and their operation a bit puzzling.
AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository)
A portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.
AMSER is a non-profit organization and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as part of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). We are a
fairly new project, and are constantly adding new resources to our library. (About 200-300 per week) The resources we add to our site come from other online digital collections, staff (area expert) additions, as well as from faculty from around the country. The goal of AMSER is not only to provide a site where instructors and students can find high-quality and authoritative web resources but to provide tools to use these resources as well. We provide a folder system (which allows you to share resources online), bulletin service (to update you with subject specific resources), saved searches, rating and comments systems and more. Because we are new, we would appreciate any feedback for improvements that could be made to the site to make it more useful for you, as well as any suggestions for online material that we could add.
Collection of 521 lessons for preK-12 math educators
The Calculus Page
From time to time over the past several centuries, the word calculus has caused more than a few college students to break out into a sweat and become a bit anxious. The site features dozens of links to valuable
online resources that deal with this branch of mathematical inquiry and discovery. The first section of the site is dedicated to providing materials for students of calculus (including calculus animations and sample exams) and a number of resources for instructors follow.
Avoidance Strategies in Mathematics
STUDENTS MAY BE LEARNING MORE ABOUT AVOIDANCE STRATEGIES THAN ARITHMETIC IN MATH CLASS; STUDY SHOWS WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO
WASHINGTON - "Please don't call on me" can be a pervasive thought by students who are not doing well in math class. By early adolescence, it is common for some students to become experts in avoidance strategies -- avoiding asking for help when they need it, withdrawing effort and resisting novel approaches to learning -- in order to deflect attention from low ability. This type of behavior can cause students to fall further behind academically and may\ eventually lead some to drop out of school. But new research shows that teachers that emphasize learning rather than performance may help prevent this self-destructive behavior. The findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
In their study involving 1,092 sixth-grade students in 65 sixth-grade classrooms in four ethnically and economically diverse school districts in three Midwestern states, Julianne C. Turner, Ph.D. of the University of Notre Dame and co-authors surveyed the students to determine use of avoidance strategies. The study also included the use of trained observers who watched and audiotaped nine of the students' teachers while they taught their math classes.
The researchers found that students reported using fewer avoidance techniquesin classrooms perceived as emphasizing learning, understanding, effort and enjoyment. In those classrooms, teachers helped students who had problems understanding, gave them opportunities to demonstrate new competencies and provided substantial motivational support for learning. Teachers in these "mastery-oriented" classrooms made sure their students did not feel inadequate or ashamed when they did not understand. "By modeling their own thinking processes, these teachers demonstrated that being unsure, learning from mistakes, and asking questions were natural and necessary parts of learning," according to the authors. By contrast, "students reported higher incidences of avoidance strategies in classrooms in which teachers devoted little attention to helping students build understanding and in which motivational support was low."
The teacher observations, say the authors, provided valuable insight into how teaching methods affect avoidance behaviors. For instance, in a classroom where students used more avoidance strategies, the teacher placed greater emphasis on getting an answer correct, with little discussion about the important concepts in a lesson and little explanation of why an answer was correct. If a student did not know the answer, the teacher would ask another student and did not usually stop to explain the answer. "Because the teacher typically did not respond to mistakes and misunderstandings with explanations or allow students to explain their strategies, his students may have felt vulnerable to public displays of incompetence and adopted more avoidance strategies," explained the researchers.
In classrooms where students used fewer avoidance strategies, the teachers tended to model, hint and elicit support from other students to help their students learn. In those classrooms, the students were active participants in instructional discourse that stressed understanding and explanation. "Perhaps because they knew their teachers and peers would help, students in these classrooms did not seem to need to adopt avoidance strategies to appear able to others," said the authors.
Classrooms with students who reported using avoidance strategies less also had teachers that used math-related humor as part of their lessons. Humor may lessen tension and encourage students to view their math classes as more enjoyable, say the authors.
Full text http://www.apa.org/journals/edu/press_releases/march_2002/edu94188.html.
Lead author http://www.apa.org/releases/mathavoidance.html
Famous Curves Index
Throughout history, there have been many famous curves. In this case, the famous curves profiled here have names such as rhodonea, right strophoid,
and the Kampyle of Eudoxus. These curves belong to the world of the mathematical sciences, and they are offered up for teachers and the generally curious by the staff at the School of Mathematics and Statistics
at the University of St. Andrews. Visitors can scroll through the complete list of curves (there are over eighty here), and click on each one for an illustration and a listing of the equation that would create such a curve.
The site is rounded out by an interactive map that lets users learn about the birthplaces of famous mathematicians from Leibniz to Babbage.
As Math Scores Lag, a New Push for the Basics
SEATTLE For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the teaching of math in American schools.
The changes are being driven by students lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math critics call it fuzzy math has crippled students with its de-emphasizing of basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways
to solve problems.
At the same time, parental unease has prompted ever more families to pay for tutoring, even for young children. Shalimar Backman, who put pressure on officials here by starting a parents group called Wheres the Math?, remembers the moment she became concerned.
When my oldest child, an A-plus stellar student, was in sixth grade, I realized he had no idea, no idea at all, how to do long division, Ms. Backman said, so I went to school and talked to the teacher, who said, We dont teach long division; it stifles their creativity.
Across the nation, the reconsideration of what should be taught and how has been accelerated by a report in September by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the nations leading group of math teachers.
It was a report from this same group in 1989 that influenced a generation of teachers to let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.
But this fall, the group changed course, recommending a tighter focus on basic math skills and an end to mile wide, inch deep state standards that force schools to teach dozens of math topics in each grade. In fourth grade, for example, the report recommends that thecurriculum should center on the quick recall of multiplication and division, the area of two-dimensional shapes and an understanding of decimals.
The Bush administration, too, has created a panel to study research on teaching math. It is expected to issue recommendations early next year. Here in Washington, Gov. Chris Gregoire has asked the State Board of Education to develop new math standards by the end of next year to bring teaching in line with international competition, and a year later to choose no more than three curriculums to replace the dozens of teaching methods now in use. Ms. Gregoire, a Democrat, also wants new math requirements for high school graduation. In Utah and Florida, too, state education officials are re-examining their math standards and curriculum.
Grass-roots groups in many cities are agitating for a return to basics. Many point to Californias standards as a good model: the state adopted reform math in the early 1990s but largely rejected it near the end of the decade, a turnaround that led to rising math achievement.
The Seattle level of concern about math may be unusual, but theres now an enormous amount of discomfort about fuzzy math on the East Coast, in Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and now New Jersey is starting to make noise, said R. James Milgram, a math professor at Stanford University. Theres increasing understanding that the math situation in the United States is a complete disaster.
Schools in New York City use a reform math curriculum, Everyday Mathematics, but some parents there, too, would like to see that changed, a step they are advocating through NYC HOLD, a group of parents and teachers that has a Web site with links to information on math battles nationwide.
A spokesman for the New York City Department of Education said that Everyday Mathematics covered both reform and traditional approaches, emphasizing knowledge of basic algorithms along with conceptual understanding. He added that research gathered recently by the federal Department of Education had found the program to be one of the few in the country for which there was evidence of positive effects on student math achievement.
The frenzy has been prompted in part by the growing awareness that, at a time of increasing globalization, the math skills of children in the United States simply do not measure up: American eighth-graders lag far behind those from Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and elsewhere on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, an international test.
Parental discontent here in Washington State intensified after the announcement in September that only 51 percent of 10th graders passed the math part of state assessment tests, far fewer than showed proficiency in reading or writing. Math is on absolutely everybodys radar in the state right now, said Ms. Backman, whose Wheres the Math? group drew hundreds of parents and math teachers last month to a forum on K-12 math. Many parents and teachers remain committed to the goals of reform math, having children understand what they are doing rather than simply memorizing and parroting answers. Traditional math instruction did not work for most students, say reform math proponents like Virginia Warfield, a professor at the University of Washington. It produces people who hate math, who cant connect the math they are doing with anything in their lives, Dr. Warfield said. Thats why we have so many parents who see their children having trouble with math and say Honey, dont worry. I never could do math either.
In Asian cultures, she added, the assumption is that everyone learns mathematics, and of course, parents will help with mathematics.
But even many of those who admire the goals of reform math want their children to have more drills.
My mother is a high school math tutor, and her joke is that this math is whats kept her in business, said Marcy Berejka, who each week brings Ben, 8, and Dana, 6, to Kumon, a tutoring center based in Japan that has more than a dozen franchises in the Seattle area. Theres a lot thats good in the new curriculum, but if you don't memorize the basic math facts, it gets harder as math gets more complicated.
The states superintendent of public instruction, Terry Bergeson, a supporter of reform math, said in an interview: I came through the reading wars years ago, and now were right in the middle of that with mathematics. It comes back to balance. Of course you need to know your math facts, but you also have to understand what youre doing. The whole country has been in denial about mathematics, and now were sort of at a second Sputnik moment.
In part, the math wars have grown out of a struggle between professional mathematicians, who say too many American students never master basic math skills, and math educators, who say children who construct their own problem-solving strategies retain their math skills better than those who just memorize the algorithm that produces the correct answer. After Dr. Milgram of Stanford appeared at a Wheres the Math? meeting, Dr. Warfield, an expert on teaching math educators, wrote in a newsletter that when Dr. Milgram told parents to fight for change, it was implicit in the instructions that mathematicians who do not agree are classified as mathematics educators (a rung or two
below the night custodian). The battle here has left many parents frustrated, confused and not sure if they should trust their childrens schools to give them the skills they need. Many have already voted with their feet, enrolling their children in math tutoring. State Representative Glenn Anderson, a Republican member of the House education committee who has fought for a more rigorous curriculum, said state data showed that Washington residents spent $149 million on tutoring and other education support services in 2004, more than three times the $44 million they spent 10 years earlier. Kumon, which has a global clientele of more than four million children in 43 countries, focuses on drilling children on basics. Students work their way through hundreds of assignments that move in incremental steps from tracing numerals all the way through differential calculus.
Every week for five years, Tove Burrows has brought her son, Petter, 13, to the Kumon Center in Mercer Island to turn in the worksheets he has done at home, sit down to new drills and pick up a set of assignments for the week ahead.
If the math curriculum in the schools were different, I would not be doing Kumon, said Ms. Burrows, whose son is an A student at Islander Middle School. But I want to make sure hes mastered the basics, and in school they dont spend enough time on basics to get that mastery. On Mercer Island, an affluent suburb of Seattle that had the states best scores on the 10th-grade test, the pendulum has begun to swing toward emphasizing computational skills, especially in high school. Were looking at texts that have more numbers and less language, said Lisa Eggers, president of the Mercer Island School Board, who at one point sent two of her three children to Kumon. And were one of the few districts where the math scores are going up.
Even so, seeking outside math help is common in the district, with almost 100 students leaving the high school for math and going instead to nearby private academies for one-on-one tutoring, for which the school give will give them credit.
John Harrison, principal of Mercer Island High School, estimates that as many as 10 percent of his schools 1,400 students are getting outside math help. Its not surprising that math is so important in Seattle, with so many people earning their living at Microsoft or Boeing, Mr. Harrison said. Our kids do very well on the state tests, compared to the state averages, but even here, math proficiency is less than reading and writing.
-
NCTM's Illuminations site (lesson plans, applets, and more) mostly middle school
-
AP Central (free registration, for upper level math)
- Quia's Shared Games/Quizzes (these are free for review, you must pay for an account where you actually test students online and record their grade)
- APlusMath - this may be too elementary but depending on your students' skill level, you may find the straight forward and easy to use drills and games here helpful
- MathForum - the one stop shop for math teachers. I really like the problem of the week where students must come up with creative answers to a challenging problem.
- CoolMath - Okay, ignore the juvenile graphics!! This is actually a good place for high school math practice including pre-calculus and Algebra II.
- High School http://www.cchs165.jacksn.k12.il.us/SalukiMath/EYH2003/EYH.htm
and http://www.cchs165.jacksn.k12.il.us/links.htm
Internet Public Library: Calculation & Conversion Tools
Calculation & Conversion Tools
http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/browse/ref19.00.00/
Websites that assist with mathematical calculations, including online calculators and conversion dictionaries and tables
Asknumbers.com
http://www.asknumbers.com/
Offers conversions covering 27 different categories including: distance, temperature, power, weight, volume, energy, speed, currency, clothing/shoe size, computer storage, and cooking.
Calculator.Com
http://www.calculator.com/
Directory of online calculators, browsable by a hierarchical subject/function directory. "There are calculators for finance, business, and science. There are ones for cooking, hobbies, and health. Some solve problems, some satisfy curiosity, and some just for fun."
Conversion Factors
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/reference/metrics/factors.htm
This site lists conversion relationship between U.S. customary units and SI (International System) units. It gives conversion factors for commonly needed values -- area, length, pressure, force, and volume -- as well as gage standards for things such as sheet metal, wire, and pipes and measures of hardness, stress, and temperature.
Conversion of Units
http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/chemistry/general/units.html
A forms based utility that converts values in one unit to any other.
Convert-me.com
http://www.convert-me.com/en/
This Javascript measurements converter provides quick conversions for Weight, Capacity and Volume, Length, Area, Speed, Pressure, Temperature, Circular Measure and Time. Requires a browser capable of handling Javascript. The author adds this disclaimer: "This converter was never intended for high precision calculations."
Convertworld
http://convertworld.com/en/
Convertworld is a unit conversion website. Currency can be calculated for 36 different countries. The date cane also be changed to reflect the most current value of the currencies. Other conversion areas are: length, temperature, weight, data storages, area, energy, pressure, speed, volume, and time. The site is available in English, German, and Portugese.
Cost-Of-Living Calculator
http://www.NewsEngin.com/neFreeTools.nsf/CPIcalc
"This utility allows you to convert dollar values between any two years to adjust for inflation." Uses the Consumers Price Index from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Footrule
http://www.footrule.com/
"Units conversion offering a very extensive range of categories and units. This interactive facility not only converts between units but also includes descriptions of usage and definitions of many of the units."
The Inflation Calculator
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
At this site, you can enter any dollar amount and compare
its value during any two years between 1800 and 1998. For
example, you can compare the worth of $100 in 1880 to its
worth in 1950.
The Medical Algorithms Project
http://www.medal.org/
"A Medical Algorithm is any computation, formula, survey, or look-up table, useful in healthcare. We have collected over 1600 algorithms (taken from the biomedical literature, including research journals and textbooks) spanning major medical domains, organized into 43 chapters. To ensure the widest possible audience, the algorithms have been implemented in an Excel workbook which you can freely download to run on your Windows or Macintosh computer. You will need MS Excel, and should be familiar with running spreadsheets." There is also Spanish mirror site linked from this site.
megaConverter
http://www.megaconverter.com/
"megaConverter.com is an ever-growing set of weights, measures and units conversion/calculation modules. megaConverters allow users to discover things like how many
seconds old they are, the difference between a gallon in the USA and a gallon in the UK, how many nanometers in an inch, how many quarts in a chaldron, and what the heck a nebuchadnezzar is."
OANDA
http://www.oanda.com/
This site offers a multilingual currency converter which contains the exchange rates for 164 currencies. Travelers can print out a cheat sheet: "a multi-value table of an exchange rate to facilitate calculations while you travel." The site also offers historical charts of exchange rates and forecasts for global markets.
Online Conversion
http://www.onlineconversion.com/
Converts just about any unit of measure to any other with over 5,000 units offered for conversion in areas including acceleration, angles, area, astronomy, cooking, clothing, density, energy, finance, frequency, distance, light, temperature, torque viscosity, volume and weight.
Time Zone Check
http://www.timezonecheck.com/
"The coolest way to find out the time in other parts of the world."
The Universal Currency Converter
http://www.xe.com/ucc/
"The Universal Currency Converter allows you to perform interactive foreign exchange rate conversion on the Internet. Type the amount of source currency in the input box. You may include commas and a decimal point. Select the source and destination currencies using the scrolling
selection boxes."