Tellagami: Fun with Short Stories

What fun! Tellegami for iPads and iPhones is a free app, which lets you and your students create stories called Gamis. With the app, you can customize characters and personalize them using your voice and your photos. There is absolutely no learning curve. In fact, it’s so easy to use that a kindergarten student sent a Gami to me. Backgrounds (see below the background with my Corgi) can be changed, characters can be resized, and Gamis can be share on Facebook, Twitter, through eMail, and SMS. Think of putting Tellegami to work in student projects, invitations, journals, and content review.

Perfect Clip Art When You Need It

DOVERPICTURA is the place to check when you need perfect clip art images. Some of the categories you might appreciate are: Holidays, Animals, Fine Art, Historical Periods, Transportation, People, Architecture, Culture, and Silhouettes and Stencils. Go to the site and you’ll receive three free image sheets.  Suppose you are looking for Renaissance images. You can purchase a royalty-free Renaissance image collection of 452 images for $14.99. If you are looking for individual images, let’s say of a butterfly, you can buy one sheet for $.99. (Four hundred ninety butterfly and moth images would cost $15.99.) Individual images in the collections are $.99 up. The images are in jpeg and tiff formats and download directly to your computer. You will love the images made available by DOVERPICTURA because they are beautifully rendered and many are rare and unique.

Manga Guide to Linear Algebra—Changing the Way Students Think

As we try to find ways to promote mathematics and science among our students, we look to technologies, software, apps inquiry learning, online courses, and engaging resources such as those offered by Shmoop and the No Starch Press. No Starch creates cartoon-type guides that are designed to encourage students to take an interest in and learn the principles of physics, calculus, electricity, molecular biology, relativity, the universe, biochemistry, and databases. The latest offering, The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra features 260+ pages that help “math and computer science students wrap their brains around a tricky required course—linear algebra.” Students read the book, which is actually a story about a student and her karate-crazed tutor and, along the way, master the concepts of linear algebra. If you are interested in browsing the Manga guides, you can request sample copies.