Google and other online graphers

You can enter an expression like sin(x),cos(x) into the Google search box, and it will give you a graph that you can zoom in on and trace! Pretty simple - nothing to download! Can ditch the graphing calculator for just plain graphing.

You can also check out the Desmos online calculator, which has many features. I  found out about it recently,  from Maria Andersen's blog.

Math Jax

MathJax is a web-based JavaScript application that you can use to include LaTeX in your web pages, like the following.
\[ \cos^2x+\sin^2x=1 \]
\[ \int x \, dx = \frac{x^2}{2}+C \]
No GIF's to export, no complex, additional markups to learn etc. It just works!
If you want to use it in Blogger, click here. Planning to use it to create more math pages with interactive features, using Wolfram Alpha widgets and GeoGebra.

Quick quizzes for fun

A fun quiz to put on your web site can be created easily at xat.com. This one's for a mini review for calculus class I'm teaching in the summer.


Get Your Own Quiz!, More Quizzes

Some thoughts on math videos online

By now, most folks in the math teaching world have heard of Khan Academy. Other free video sites for math include Math TV and Brightstorm. I do refer students to these sites for review and reinforcement. In YouTube, these types of instructional math videos get a large number of views, and so they  obviously address a need out there.

However, I am not convinced that these types of videos actually illustrate concepts very well. There are now a wide variety of technologies that can illustrate math concepts and can be interactive. GeoGebra, graphing calculators, Microsoft Math, OCW applets in math (from  MIT), and lots of applets spread throughout the Internet do a great job of illustrating ideas that are hard to do with just chalk and talk (or their video counterparts). But a simple survey of YouTube videos describing their capabilities showed that they attracted far fewer viewers.

Is it just that students are used to wanting something reinforced the same way they've seen it in their lectures? Do they just want to get their (online) homework done? Are these types of resources used often enough in classrooms to illustrate ideas? 

I don't think any of these technologies takes away from basic skills. I think they make conceptual understanding easier  for many students - if they are guided along those lines. Not everyone can make abstract connections solely on the basis of processing symbolic notation. If one wishes to progress to higher level math or use math in other subjects, it is necessary to be able to think about math in addition to the skills, whether at the beginning algebra level or at the calculus level.And many of these technologies that have been around for a while now can make that task a little simpler.

Wolfram|Alpha widgets for an online course

I've blogged about using Wolfram|Alpha (W|A) widgets for general use. Since I teach an online intro stats course every year, I thought it be handy to embed the widgets right in the topics section within the course management system. W|A widgets can fetch some data distributions - it's a lot easier to insert these types things at point of use rather than to send students to web sites all over the Internet. Also, I do not have to type extra instructions so that students can obtain the proper data. Here is the one I plan to use for some health statistics. ( I noticed that the units on the plot for height and weight seem to be inconsistent with the text - puzzled by that one, since W|A is usually pretty accurate.)

Online LaTeX Editors

Although my primary word processor is MS Word 2007 for class materials, I use LaTeX for assignments in my upper level courses. Many of the assignments I create are not too lengthy and so I started searching for a quick browser-based online LaTeX compiler. Here are three I am experimenting with. The first one is totally free. The other two offer a free limited version.

• latexlab.org : works with your Google account sign-in, but it's not affiliated with Google. Advantage is that your tex files are in the Google docs folder. I found the previewer to be somewhat clunky and it seemed to run the slowest of the three I found. But it is free and has no restrictions.
• scribtex : worked very quickly on my sample latex file and rendered a nice PDF file in a separate tab. The interface is very minimalist, though. The free account has restrictions, but will be fine for my use of creating assignments
• verbosus: Has a nicer interface than scribtex, with the tex file and pdf file side by side, but a lot of the window's real estate was taken up with file and project windows. Maybe there is a way to customize it, but I didn't check it out. The free account has restrictions as well.

 I think I'll work with latexlabs and scribtex for now. But I thought verbosus was worth checking out.