Pedagoguery Software: Poly

A great little freeware to show off today! As a mathematics teacher, and frequent user of whiteboards/smartboards, I am always

looking for nice programs or web sites to use interactively. This is one particularily good program that does just one thing, but does it good. It shows you the most common and a lot of the uncommon geometric solids. You can (use your hands on the smartboard to) zoom in and out on the solids, open them up and crunch them back together again. You can print the layout nets for each solid if you want to make your own physical model. For instance, have your students make footballs (I am talking soccer, not the “other sort” of football, where they mostly cheat by using their hands) from pentagons and hexgons. Solids can be shown transparent or…well..solid.

Go download a free version at http://www.peda.com/poly/

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Norwegian GeoGebra Institute

Image via Wikipedia

NGI, Norsk GeoGebra Institutt (Norwegian geoGebra Institute) was founded this year. Located at NTNU, the university of Trondheim. This institute is aiming to be a gathering point for all activities related to GeoGebra. If you don’t already know this excellent piece of software, take at look at the GeoGebra tag to the right to see some of my older posts, or check it ouf free on the official site, http://www.geogebra.org.

The institute will facilitate courses and seminars, online and on campus, and the first courses are already being planned and starting out. Also, you can be certified for being an instructor at four different levels by attending courses and seminars.