Thing 11

I began by exploring all of the different widget sites. I have to admit that many of the widgets that I was choosing to embed gave me difficulty. I wasn't able to embed them unless I was doing so in a post. Once I started checking out the widgets at Widgetbox, I was hooked and had to stop looking. There were so many great math related ones that were quite easy to embed. I was easily able to play around with the size of them and also reformat my blog site to make everything look right. As of now, I feel pretty comfortable with embedding.

Because I was having so much fun with them, I ended up embedding three different widgets. I began with a multiplication table - since multiplication facts are always a struggle for kids (and sometimes parents). It is not really a teaching tool. I just thought it was great that someone could put in any number and get the "basic multiplication facts" for it. The next widget I chose was a game called multiplication station. In it, a person works to find the factors for a given product. This could be a game that parents play with their children on the computer. FInally, I found a tangrams game. (I must admit that I played it for quite a long time and got quite addicted!) I chose this game because so often most people think of math as computation. Math education involves so much more than this. The tangram game stresses spatial sense, something that most don't often think of as math. I thought this would give parents a good opportunity to better understand what types of math their children are learning.

Because I'm not really thinking of using my blog as an educational tool for students, I really didn't think that widgets would have any educational relevance to my blog. However, the more I thought about it, many of the widgets will be quite useful as I plan to use my blog to educate parents. Just thinking about some of the widgets that I chose, I can see parents using them to better understand what it is that their children are learning. So, in that since, I can very much see using widgets to enhance my instruction to parents.