Brad Burkman <bburk...@lsmsa.edu> wrote: I gave a session yesterday at the annual meeting of the Louisiana Association of Teachers of Mathematics on using Sage in the high- school classroom; kcrisman asked me to share the experience with the group.
My presentation worksheet, LATM_SAGE_INTRO, is published at: sagemath.shodor.org:8000 clemix.clemson.edu:345467 sagenb.org I posted it at all three because I'm paranoid that some technology will fail during a presentation. In fact, Shodor's site did not work yesterday. SAGE IN CLASS This fall, for the first time, I am using Sage extensively in my Algebra II course. If you go to sagemath.shodor.org:8000, you can see several published pages with LSMSA in the title. You can see the assignments at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1klcdZdKBZemihw0SjeIdQQPHjVuc9ZWo_6gedaUN9Do/edit?hl=en_US Usually the assignment is to use Sage to check exercises in the textbook that they also do by hand. To check that students are actually doing the work, I ask them on a quiz or test to give me the syntax for something they were supposed to have done several times in the homework, like create a matrix. Shodor has very generously invited me to have my students create accounts on their server. GIVING SUCH A PRESENTATION Eleven teachers attended my one-hour session. Ten students per instructor is about the max for a computer training session, because each student has unique difficulties. I had not been confident that there would be WiFi in the conference center [there was], so I had CD's for Mac, but for PC's I had trouble creating a SageLIVE CD that included the worksheet. I didn't have the budget to buy USB drives in sufficient quantity. I began the session with Henry Neeman's line that "THE TECHNOLOGY WILL FAIL !!!," and it went reasonably smoothly. Most of the teachers had used Mathematica in college, and many use GeoGebra in their classes. One teacher didn't have a sufficient version of Java to run the Jmol 3D diagrams, which is a big selling point for using Sage in the classroom. I had the same trouble on one of the three laptops I'd brought. None of the attendees had heard of Sage before. Given the feedback and intensity of participation, I would expect that two of them will be using Sage at all a month from now. One of those is a professor of math education at Centenary College. One of the sections of the tutorial worksheet is a @interact module I copied from a demo site, graphing the sine with its Taylor polynomials of different degree. Some teachers found it fascinating; others had never heard of Taylor polynomials. Welcome to American education. I would be happy to answer questions about my experience with Sage in the high school classroom. I will be at SC11 in Seattle, Saturday- Tuesday Nov 12-15, and plan to give a "resource" (we're not supposed to call them "posters"): SC11 Education & Broader Engagement Resource Fair At the Joint Education & Broader Engagement Evening Social Saturday November 12 2011, 7:00-9:00pm, Red Lion Hotel Brad Burkman bburk...@lsmsa.edu Instructor in Mathematics Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en. Wow, that sounds great! Too bad I can't use SAGE exclusively in my math classes. My math students need to be proficient in graphing calculators for their NYS Regents exams and AP exams and other assessments where they portable devices. Otherwise, I would also use SAGE exclusively in High School math classes. I do use SAGE exclusively in my preCS class and in my Calculus Research Lab! If you are interested, you can get more info on these projects from my blog as listed below. Thanx, A. Jorge Garcia Applied Math and CompSci http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com http://www.youtube.com/calcpage2009 Sent via DROID on Verizon Wireless -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en.
