Found a nice ebook

I was looking at the iBooks shop for books on iBook author and stumbled across a 21 page ebook on using the iPad to teach math called "Transforming Math with iPad Strategies for best practices".  It is a nice guide with specific suggestions for activities including the use of three dimensional figures and how they are created.  There are lots of examples to check out and it gives me some ideas along with enough information to start playing with it.  

The best thing of all is that this short ebook is free.  I just bought my first Mac and have installed iBook Author on it.  I have been downloading free ebook on iBook author and in the process discovered free ebooks on using the iPad in the classroom so I am exploring those. Tomorrow, I am going to look at "The Teachers iPadoPedia An A-z of using iPad in the classroom." 

In the meantime, I am going to checkout some of the apps mentioned in the ebook I looked at today.

Geoboards and Book Creator

Yesterday I ended up having a preschooler in my room while I was doing work after school.  I put her on geometry pad and she did very, very, well on it.  She had a lovely time making patterns and showing me her creations.  This reminded me that if I give students free reign to choose a program, many choose this to play with and create patterns.  I think given a chance, students enjoy creating their own original art.  My geometry class will soon start learning about congruent triangles after they learn about classifying angles.  I've decided they can make a small book using Book Creator on classifying triangles by sides or angles using the geoboard for the illustrations and they can put in the information using text.  The next step in the process would be to have students using showme or other such program to make a presentation for the different theorems used in proving congruent triangles.
Each day I find more things I can do with the free apps I have.  I will start this in about 2 weeks.

Quandary

I have been having students take notes on their iPads and now one class has a test coming up.  In the past, I have allowed students to use their notes during a test but the notes had to be kept across the room, only one person could be up at any time and they could not take a paper or pencil to the notes. They had to remember the material.

So where the quandary comes in is that I have been encouraging students to use the graphing app for families of graphs, and inequalities.  If I let them use their notes on the iPads, then they do not get a chance to get up, move around and clear their brains.  I know that computer based state testing begins in another year or two and that will have a calculator available to use during the test.

I think for now, I will go with the handwritten notes so they get one more chance to learn the material.