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This blog is no longer active. Please see my website http://www.mymathspace.net 
The older material will still be here, because of web searches.

Web based Excel

It is now possible to run a limited version of Excel completely on the web. Below is an Excel web app that I created. It's interactive - you can change numbers and the results will change. More Excel material can be found at my website, http://www.mymathspace.net

MOOCs as course supplements

I'm teaching an Intro to Proofs course this Fall, and am planning to have students also sign up  online for a course called Introduction to Mathematical thinking, a free massively open online course (MOOC) offered by  coursera . The course will be delivered by Stanford professor Keith Devlin, and looking at the online course outline, it looks like a perfect supplement for my transitions course.

This will be the first time I am trying this, and I myself have not taken any coursera course. Looking forward to this experiment. It can only enhance the students' learning experience, and it doesn't cost anything.

Interactive math demonstrations from Wolfram

The following is one of literally thousands of interactive demonstrations in the Wolfram Demonstrations web site. You will need the free CDF player to run the demonstration. A small collection of these can be posted on a class web site for students to explore and then answer questions interactively, perhaps using Google forms, or as a hand-in assignment. Formulating good questions to go along with these demonstartions is a necessity if students are to comprehend the concepts. Otherwise, it may just seem to them like a dumbed down video game!

Quadratic in Vertex Form (or Turning Point Form) from the Wolfram Demonstrations Project by Rod Bate

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.