Thing 17

After looking through many of the presentations on Slideshare, I became frustrated. I did a variety of searches with terms such as math, computation, instruction, families, etc. to see if there was anything relevant to my blog. I also searched some of my favorite math researchers and authors. Many of the presentations that I found were more like sales pitches of books and resources. I then decided to look at Zoho. Again, I didn't have much luck. I actually found that there were many less presentations to choose from and nothing that interested me at all. After going back to Slideshare, I decided to check out a math tricks presentation. I originally avoided this one since a math trick was what I embedded using You Tube, so I figured I'd try something different. Because of my frustration, I finally chose it. As I looked through the 23 slide presentation, I found one slide that would have been inappropriate to post for families. (There was a sex reference in it.) Because of this, I researched whether I could alter a presentation withing Slideshare. Based on what I found, this can't be done. I could have downloaded, altered it and then posted it, but I wanted the experience of embedding from this site. As I went back to the presentation, I decided to just do a search for math tricks. What I discovered is that someone else must have had this same issue. There was a revised presentation of this one with one slide missing. As I checked out the revised presentation, the sex slide was missing, so I was now able choose this one.

As much as I tried to find a different presentation, I must say that this one is a great one. Math tricks tend to be fun for most people. It's a great way to get kids (and adults) interested in numbers. Playing with numbers is a great way to build number sense which is crucial to all math instructions. These tricks encourage people to "play" with numbers. Kids and parents can have fun with this presentation.

As for how this could be used in the classroom, there were many lessons that I found that teachers could use in the classrooms. However, since all Newington teachers now have SmartBoard access in their rooms, I believe there are so many better SmartBoard Notebook lessons that exist and can easily be integrated into classrooms. For teachers who do choose to use Slideshare or Zoho, I would caution them to carefully review the presentations first to assure that they are appropriate. Also, I would check to see that the presentations that they are using aren't actually advertisements for publishers.

Since I provide a variety of professional development activities, I may go back to Slideshare in the future to look for presentations related to topics I'll be sharing. There may be some Powerpoints that I could at least use as a foundation to a presentation.