Blog
Blog moving
Sunday, November 16, 2008
I'm moving this blog to https://myrhit.rose-hulman.edu/personal/holden/Blog/ --- it's hosted at my home institution, and provides a little more functionality. Sorry for the inconvenience! Hope to see you there!
Grading paper tests using a Tablet key
Friday, November 07, 2008
I've been letting students use laptops (and now tablets) on some exams and quizzes for some years now. But I still require them to copy everything by hand onto a test paper and hand that in. That may change in the future, but for the moment I'm doing that grading on paper.
So in the past what I've done next is to take a blank copy of the exam, fill in the solutions, and then make a fairly detailed rubric describing how I'm going to grade. I sit down with the solution key and the stack of papers, and as I go through the papers I revise the rubric as necessary. When I'm done, the solution keys go into a folder for each course, and eventually into a file cabinet from which they may or may not ever emerge.
I've been thinking for some time that this is a waste of paper and of filing space, and that some portion of this process should be done electronically. Last week I sat down with my tablet and a stack of exam papers and tried it out.
Firstly, I was afraid that the process of reading the key off of the tablet while I was working would be inconvenient, but it turned out not to be bad at all. If I was even a little bit organized in my workspace (and I was only a little bit organized!) I could leave the tablet where it was and shuffle papers around it --- essentially I treated it as a very large and heavy piece of paper. Even with it plugged into a power outlet, that worked fine.
Two unexpected bonuses (besides saving on paper and filing space):
I could easily use multiple colors on my key: one color for solutions, another for point values, maybe another for notes for next time or alternate solutions or things I announced in class because I'd botched them on the test. (Not much of that last week, thankfully!)
I could erase cleanly. What with all of the rubric revisions I do on the fly, this was amazingly helpful. I had no idea how much easier my solution key would be to read just because I didn't have to scribble things out.
OTOH, this week I had a short quiz to grade and I intended to do it the same way. However, my computer wasn't booted up when I started and by the time it had finished booting up I had already written the solutions key out on paper and started using it. So that key stayed on paper. Stay tuned for next time....
Math in Your Hands
Friday, October 31, 2008
I almost forgot: I gave a poster presentation at WITPE entitled "Math in Your Hands: Integrating the Use of Maple with the Collaborative Use of Wireless Tablet PCs" I've posted the poster on Slideshare at <http://www.slideshare.net/joshuarbholden/math-in-your-hands-presentati
Here's the abstract:
This poster is a preliminary report on a Fall 2008 project to explore the use of tablets in calculus classes in order to foster student engagement by incorporating active learning and collaborative activities. The use of tablets can make many improvements in a classroom, but mathematics classes pose special challenges which have not yet been systematically explored at Rose-Hulman. The most difficult of these from a technical perspective is the integration of Maple with other Tablet PC software. This project explores ways to achieve this integration as well as other pedagogical improvements which the use of Tablet PCs could bring to mathematics classrooms at Rose-Hulman.
SLICE
Friday, October 31, 2008
Another piece of software I saw at WIPTE was "SLICE", which is available at <http://slice.cs.uiuc.edu>. SLICE is a competitor with DyKnow and Classroom Presenter, although "competitor" isn't really the right word since SLICE isn't commercial software. It's being developed at the University of Illinois, and the presenter at WIPTE called it "research software", which seems to mean "rough around the edges". It does have some really nice features, though.
Since I'm very familiar with DyKnow and not at all with other similar systems, I though I'd just give some pros and cons of SLICE compared with DyKnow.
Pros:
- Free.
- *Very* user configurable (*if* you know how to code XML and Python).
- "Laser pen" lets you write strokes which disappear automatically when you make the next stroke.
- Buttons to take polls with can be embedded right into a panels, either in advance or on the fly.
- Instructors can establish answer boxes on the panels where students writing can be seen by the instructor in real-time.
Cons:
- Currently lacks many features of DyKnow, including options for synchronizing students with instructor and management of panels. (These could be added by a user, but only if you know XML and Python.)
- Not completely stable (can crash).
- User interface not as polished.
- Not as many options for export of notebooks.
MoboMath
Friday, October 31, 2008
I was at the Workshop on the Impact of Pen-Based Technology on Education (WIPTE) a couple of weeks ago, and saw a couple of new (to me, at least) pieces of tablet-related software that I'm pretty excited about. The first is called MoboMath, from Enventra <http://www.enventra.com/>. It's a mathematical handwriting recognition system that lets you write mathematical expressions on a Tablet PC or other pen-based device and it automatically converts it into one of several formats, including Microsoft Equation Editor, TeX, and MathML, or just a nice typeset image. Even better, you can use the pen to easily drag-and-drop the converted output into another application such as Microsoft Word or Maple.
It seems to do a pretty good job of recognition and it has very nice features for correcting mistakes in recognition, including easy access to alternate choices. What I'd really like to use this for is entering expressions into Maple; unfortunately the MathML output isn't quite compatible with Maple. However, I've been talking to the people at Enventra and they say that will be fixed quite soon!
Oh, and for those using Excel on the Tablet PC, Enventra also has MoboCalc, which is supposed to do similar things for Excel formulas. I haven't tried that one yet, though.
Integration of DyKnow with Computer Algebra Systems
Friday, October 31, 2008
I'm putting together a sabbatical proposal which would involve developing tighter integration between computer algebra systems and DyKnow and I'm trying to gauge the level of interest among math instructors for such a thing. As a starting point, I'm enclosing a short proposal (at the bottom of this post) that I sent to the CTO at DyKnow describing what I'm interested in --- sorry that it's a little technical, but hopefully not too bad. The notebook I mention below is posted at <http://www.rose-hulman.edu/class/ma/holden/Math113/Notebooks/demos/pit
or if you don't want to bother with that I've also posted a PDF version at
<http://www.rose-hulman.edu/class/ma/holden/Math113/Notebooks/demos/pit
_______________________________
My dream product for interfacing DyKnow with Maple (or another Computer
Algebra System) would be a version of DyKnow which understood
mathematical expressions and/or CAS commands embedded in the DyKnow
Inbox. When these mathematical expressions were selected, a menu option
could be invoked to pass the expression or command to the CAS. The CAS
would return the value of the expression or command, which could be
either displayed in a pop-up window or inserted into the Inbox. For
example, page 1 of the enclosed DyKnow notebook shows entering functions
into Maple (Maple's responses are shown in blue), and also using Maple
to plot a curve (in Maple, one would right-click on [f(t), g(t)] and
choose a plotting method from a menu to produce the plot shown). Pages
2 and 3 show more complicated Maple calculations; again, Maple's
responses are in blue.
This ability to interact with the CAS would provide a number of benefits
to the instructor and student. For example, the instructor could show
what happens to a calculation when various parameters are changed, or
answer student questions about how changing various parts of the
equation affects the answer. DyKnow's replay function could let
students go back and see the various versions of the expression and how
the answer changes. Alternatively, the instructors could ask students
to do problems using DyKnow where they would have to enter their own
calculations, and DyKnow (using the CAS) would provide the answers,
which the students could then submit to the instructor using DyKnow's
panel submission features. Ideally, the instructor would be able to
choose whether expressions in the Inbox could be entered and/or modified
by the student or only by the instructor to suit various circumstances.
As a less ambitious goal, DyKnow could support mathematical expressions
embedded in the Inbox which could not be directly manipulated but could
be copied and pasted into a CAS and the answer copied and pasted back
into DyKnow, in the same way that text and images can now be copied and
pasted. This should also include the ability to copy animations, three
dimensional figures, and virtual reality environments produced by the
CAS and paste them into DyKnow in a way that preserves the ability of
the student and instructor to interact with them. Page 4 of the
enclosed DyKnow notebook includes a window onto a web page which has two
manipulable 3D graphs and a 3D animation; unfortunately I believe this
web page is not accessible outside Rose-Hulman. Pages 4 and 5 show
static captured versions of the web page, however.
Introduction
Friday, October 31, 2008
First a quick introduction --- one of my interests is the use of technology in undergraduate mathematics education, and I'm going to try to use this blog to talk about some of the hardware, software, and pedagogy involved. I'm currently involved in a project to investigate the use of Tablet PCs and DyKnow (a collaborative note-taking and classroom management system) in teaching calculus, and also the integration of Tablet PC's and DyKnow with Computer Algebra Systems such as Maple, Mathematica, etc. If you are also interested in these things, I'd love to hear from you!