Task 10 - More Tools

In looking over the list of suggested tools for this task, I decided to look at the concept mapping tools. They seemed like a potentially useful tool that hadn't really been covered yet, and I could definitely imagine using them in my courses. The two tools that were specifically mentioned were Gliffy and Mindomo. Of the two, Mindomo is billed more purely as concept mapping, whereas Gliffy is designed to cover a wider range of applications, particularly flowcharts and assorted technical diagrams.

I think both kinds of application mind have some use in the classroom. I can imagine using Gliffy to produce diagrams of problem solving strategies, or maps of dependency relationships between concepts in the syllabus. I think for something like looks a little more like Inspiration, a pure concept mapper should actually be more intuitive, casual, and friendly than either of those two sites however. I found that Bubbl.us might actually be better for this than either of the two listed examples. It's incredibly quick to use, and more fun to actually create content with. I noticed that on a lot of the Math forums on tools for the classroom, Bubbl.us seemed to be the default application for this sort of thing, and I can see why.

Meanwhile, although I suppose, Bubbl.us technically counts as finding another tool, it's really more of the same sort of thing, so I'm going to include one more area of research and a couple of more tools that I might use.

One key issue if I'm going to have students creating a math-related Wiki is that students will need to be able to enter equations into the pages. Here are a few basic strategies for embedding math equations in a web page:

• MathML. Looks good, built into recent browsers, but creating and editing the stuff raises issues.
• Image files. There are quite a few utilities for creating png files in a math editor, and they can be embedded like any other image. Fairly easy to implement but has disadvantages in that the source gets lost (so editing involves rebuilding the object) and they are less slickly embedded in text than a MathML object would be.
• Some sort of gadget that embeds an external equation object.
  

OK, so the most interesting potential tool that I saw is one that might be a good way to implement the MathML option, and might really make the creating and editing side a snap. The tool I'm looking at is AsciiMathML , which is basically a javascript tool that you embed in a webpage. The tool then automatically converts certain tagged ascii markup expressions into MathML for display. The actual Wiki or whatever only contains ascii markups, which are easy for students to create and edit. The display incorporates spiffy MathML equations.

The actual implementation of this might take a little fiddling on my part. What I really have to do is, when I set up the wiki, include the code to load the java script tool as part of the header that is automatically applied to all pages on the Wiki. And, of course, provide basic instructions for creating and editing equations, but the ascii part of it means that most equations are entered in as straightforward a way as possible.

Another possible tool that works great for creating (but less so for editing) is Wolfram's free MathML converter, which takes math expressions (in either traditional notation or Mathematica notation) and converts them to MathML that you can embed on a page. Again, though, the problem is that once you've got a big impenetrable blob of MathML on the page, it's hard to fix small errors without just redoing it. Mind you, redoing is pretty quick. The advantage here is that there is less setup to do on my part, but I'm not so lazy that I don't want to at least try the option that seems like it would be better for the students.

There's a pretty good Firefox plugin that does a similar job to the MathML converter, and gives a UI that's more like the equation editor in things like Word. The plug in is called Firemath , and if I were just casually blogging myself and putting in the occasional equation, it's the sort of thing I might use.

A final option might be to embed the SITMO LaTeX Equation Editor into the Wiki pages. It doesn't really seem like a good solution over all, even though the results are pretty. First of all, I don't really want to have to teach the kids LaTeX (in something like the Math Seminar course I have sometimes done this, but that's a situation where a decent fraction of the students are likely to end up using it later in life). Also, it just seems like a bad mix of difficult editing, third-party dependency (I don't want my future display dependent on SITMO surviving), and so forth.

Anyway, to make a HS Math Class Wiki really fly, I'm definitely going to need support for equations, geometric diagrams (embedding Sketchpad images or java apps is pretty easy, and might do the trick, though they will be less editable than I'd like - the ability for other people to revise and extend your objects is key to the whole Web 2.0 thing), and function plots (I've looked at a few tools for this as well).