Posts Tagged ‘wink’
Taught: Using Excel to calculate Mean and Frequency
While on the subject of statistics, here is a resource which can help with teaching a useful facet of spreadsheets — calculating the mean, median, mode, etc. of data.
(Source: mean-and-frequency-in-excel.swf)
This was created using the excellent (and free!) piece of software Wink.
Wink is basically a free version of software like Turbodemo (or for the more Web 2.0 people out there, Jing), which allows you to create ’screencasts’, capturing screenshots and turning them into standalone animations (in Wink’s case, Flash .swf files). These are used in the help files of many pieces of software, like the graphing package Autograph. As well as capturing screenshots, and keypresses, you can add annotations, and link forward/back to different sections of the recording.
Screencasts like this have great potential for demonstrations, not just of technology, but also as ways of recording how to solve maths problems. They also let a teacher run through a problem without having write material on the board constantly. The downside, of course, is that they do require a significant amount of effort to produce, but sites like MathCasts are beginning to offer a number of premade screencasts, which I need to look through at some point!
Tags: Excel, ict, Maths, screencasts, statistics, wink