TT1351: Ready-Made Content

Ready-made videos:
http://web.clark.edu/math/Calculator/
This site has a collection of ~40 tutorial videos for using the TI-84 graphing calculator, which is what I use in my college algebra courses.  In a face-to-face class, I have the opportunity to show students how to use the calculator and help them when they are learning new skills, but this can be difficult to do with an online student.  I would post links to specific skills as we got to topics where we needed to use the calculator for that purpose.

Podcasts:
I had never considered the use of podcasts before in mathematics.  I found an interesting podcast called "Math Mutation" at http://mathmutation.blogspot.com/  This podcast describes itself as "a short podcast for people of all ages, where we explore fun, interesting, or just plain weird corners of mathematics that you probably didn't hear in school."  The way I see this being used in my online class would be as a discussion started for weekly posts, discussing how math relates to everyday topics (such as voting and politics) as well as class topics.  New podcasts are released about once a month.
As far as instructions, I don't think any would be needed for students listening on their computers.  Though some instructions about how to download this on to a phone/mp3 player might be helpful.

Learning Objects:
Starting with a definition, learning objects are digital entities (small ‘chunks’ of e-learning content) that can be delivered over the Internet and reused in a many of ways. For example, instructional designers can create these instructional components or objects that can then be assembled in a number of times in different learning situations, these learning objects can be organized using what is called metadata (meaning "data about data"), the metadata cataloging system allows educators to search access and then reuse these learning objects as needed.
Therefore, one can describe learning objects as:
            1.         Small "chunks" of instructional material
            2.         Catalogued by metadata
            3.         Are reusable
            4.         Are in a digital format
Some sources include:   Merlot http://www.merlot.org  National Science Digital Library http://nsdl.org/  and Wisc-Online http://www.wisc-online.com
One thing I found on Merlot that could be used across a variety of courses is Paul Seeburger's Dynamic Calculus Site which has a Calculus Function Grapher (http://web.monroecc.edu/pseeburger/)  This interactive grapher could be used for class demos or for student investigation in graphing functions, polar, parametric, and piecewise graphs.