Tarsia Software

I've been off school the past two days with man flu so nothing to report from the world of teaching as I haven't been doing any. Unfortunately I'll be back tomorrow.

On the up side, I have recruited another blogger to the team, who will hopefully be joining us next week. I was going to introduce her, but then thought I should leave that to her, and maybe introduce myself. Or maybe we should introduce each other? Hmmm... such important decisions...

So, today's treat is another free and useful piece of software. It's Formula Tarsia, from Hermitech, a company based in Ukraine. The program allows you to make jigsaw type resources which students then have to put together by matching questions with correct answers.

The download page is here, however it appears that there is only a Windows version. Once you've downloaded the software, you can see what it can do by downloading examples from Craig Barton's website. Bryan Dye's Mathsnet site also threatens to make file-sharing available, however this doesn't seem to be in place yet.

The software supports full WYSIWYG equation editing, and provides you with an answer sheet as well as the jigsaw. The latter will need cutting out, but that's something the students can do. Maybe I should include some screenshots at some point. It would also mean I could try out the "insert image" button and see how it works.

Early night for me now, what with having to work tomorrow...

Geogebra - it's free!

Hi,

This may be a case of preaching to the converted, but if you haven't yet seen the light then you really should download Geogebra software. It's fantastic and free. Possibly the best free software that doesn't carry advertisements a Mathematics teacher could find.

It's essentially a geometry and graphing package, arguably better at the former than Autograph, and better at the latter than Geometer's Sketch Pad. There's a command line user interface which isn't ideal and will take students a bit of getting used to, but the being free it means that all your students can use it, at school and at home.

There a Mac version and a PC version, and if you don't want to install the full program on your machine, then you can run a web applet.

I may write more on these three applications, once I've got the hang of how to use this blogging software.