Teacher Development
This page contains links to materials used in ITCEP's Professional Development courses for teachers. I've included materials used in the summer courses, as well as links for subjects from the Academic Year Network events. You can always use this web address to access these materials; if I ever move them from my personal webpage to the ITCEP web server, I'll make sure this page redirects you to the proper location.
Please email me at rogness@math.umn.edu if something is missing. We used the words, "We'll post a link to that" a number of times; I've tried to remember everything, but it's very possible that I forgot something along the way.
Geometry Summer Course
- Ambigram Generator. You can further information at www.ambigram.com. The ambigrams used in Dan Brown's book are at www.johnlangdon.net.
- We didn't use www.tessellations.org during class, but it has a lot of nice resources.
- After we talked about Escher's tessellations, I mentioned some of the mathematics in his other pictures, including the picture which should have "infinitely many copies of itself" in the middle. You can read a high-level explanation and, more importantly, download the movies.
- Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem using Shearing
- We occasionally referred to MathWorld and PlanetMath in class. These are online mathematical encyclopedias, but be warned: their entries are typically written at a high level.
Advanced Viewpoint (Capstone) Summer Course
- The MacTutor archive is a great repository for mathematical history. You can find much of the history of the various number systems there. You can also read Wikipedia's entry on Roman Numerals. (That page has links to Wikipedia's summaries of other number systems, too.)
- With such a low-tech classroom I didn't get a chance to show this, but here is my favorite demonstration of orders of magnitude.
- Biography of Georg Cantor, the man who is largely responsible for our ways of thinking about infinity.
- Hotel Infinity
- Dr. Math page about why 0.9999... = 1. The first explanation given there is at a fairly high level, but you might be interested in the other answers given in the links at the bottom of the page.
- Online Reverse Polish Notation Calculator.
Pythagorean Theorem and Distances
- Animated Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
- Circle of Radius 5. Click and drag on the point.
Spatial Reasoning and Visualization
- Information about the GeoWall, which we used to view three dimensional images. If you follow the link to "Visualizations" you can find some of the materials we used, although you won't be able to view them in three dimensions on a standard computer.
- Other materials can be found on my collections of visualizations, including the program which let us fly through three dimensional space with copies of the Earth.
- Interactive versions of the rod puzzles.
- National Library of Virtual Manipulatives
Topology
- The Real Underground, which shows how the map of the London Underground differs from actual geography.
- Topology for Kids
- What is Topology?
- Rubber Geometry: Topology
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Many thanks to css/edge for a lot of the ideas used in the creation of this page.
