Tech guru Lisa Johnson introduced me to this fabulous resource right on time.  My students are beginning a geometry unit, and I can’t think of a better way to expose them to the voluminous vocabulary than using thinglink!  What is thinglink?  Check it out here.

To make my own creation, I designed a slide in Keynote with various geometric figures of interest.  I scanned the web for some links for students to explore, and quickly found that interactive iPad-friendly links for geometry topics are a bit sparse out there (sooo many great goodies rely on flash currently, boo!)  I did stumble upon shmoop.com which I found to be very refreshing with just enough dry humor for any middle-schooler to enjoy.  Plus, there are some iPad-friendly “exercises” built in for each geometry topic so students have a chance to quiz themselves along the way.  Nice!

I plan to use this thinglink tomorrow as an anchoring activity after students finish an assessment on the previous unit.  Once we can come together as a class and get started on the new content, my hope is that students have already become quite familiar with the thinglink content.  What a versatile little tool!

*Update* This was a great way to introduce the next unit as students finished a quiz today.  It was fun to watch them all clicking different topics and previewing the upcoming content.  I explained to them that this Thinglink even serves as a nice little study guide for a future assessment.  I would love to create one or two of these for every chapter! After using the Shmoop website, I couldn’t resist showing this popular Seinfeld clip at the end of the class period.  No, You’re Shmoopie! P.P.S. Here’s another ThingLink for exploring Scientific Notation topics too:

This guest post was written by Cathy Yenca, Middle School Mathematics Teacher in the Eanes Independent School District in Austin, Texas. Cathy has recently started writing about her classroom experiences with iPads  via the MathyCathy blog.