Wednesday, March 16, 2011

SO excited about Geogebra

A nice person commented from my last post and showed me some applets she'd made for Geogebra (thank you Lsquared). This must have planted a seed in my mind, because today I was tinkering around with how to start up my trigonometry unit. I went to the Geogebra site. I clicked "download". Then I clicked "Applet Start". I figured my kids don't have downloading capabilities on the school computers, so this would be fine.

I tinkered around with things and came up with this activity. I'm going to make a worksheet that goes with it to guide them through a self teaching, first day of trig, what is sine/cosine/tangent activity. I think some of the questions may even be of the effect of, "set your triangles, set up your calculator just so, press cos ____ (degree shown), compare it to ratio."

I would love feedback on this "non applet". Effective? Hard to manage? Fine?

Note: I tested out opening the file on another computer. It "failed" with Firefox, but worked fine with Explorer. I DID have to change the window size to 200% or something like that. But there is a way to show WHOLE picture.

Anyway! Off to write the worksheet. I'll share. Okay, really off to dinner then Lindy Hop, then Marfa, THEN to write the worksheet.

4 comments:

  1. Looks great. You could even use a Google Form and have students submit their responses that way (go green). The following links are geogebra applets that I made for my Trig class. Feel free to use/modify.

    The applet was easy to use and effective.

    http://www.geogebra.org/en/upload/files/english/Daniel_A_Kaufmann/Radian_Measures.html

    http://www.geogebra.org/en/upload/files/english/Daniel_A_Kaufmann/Law_of_Sines_SSA.html

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  2. Thanks, Daniel, and thanks for sharing your 2 applets. It gives me ideas for when I'm teaching precalculus next year. Questions: (maybe I should look it up, but ....) is it simple to create the applet after you've made your geogebra activity? Do you prefer the ready made applets as opposed to sending/giving the kids a file to open (I think I've answered that one just now)?

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  3. I'll answer! Creating an applet is easy. FILE->EXPORT->DYNAMIC WORKSHEET. (You can experiment with the different text boxes and check boxes on the export window that pops up). Click on the export button in the lower right corner.

    My students use it to create applets for our wiki all the time. http://madeiramath2.wikispaces.com

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  4. Thanks, Steve! New Skill, and I'm ON it.

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