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.

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