All the rules of course delivery for education in science and mathematics have changed. Of the two standard icons of education, the teacher and the textbook, the latter is teetering at the edge of existence. Instructors are creating Web-based supplements at an amazing pace. Publishers are bringing their books "up to date" with both websites and CD-ROMs. Universities and School Districts alike are scrambling to climb on board the IT train, though many remain nervous about the quality issues. Practitioners are trumpeting the new millennium of technology. Commercial vendors are regarding IT and distance education as an untapped resource comparable in scope to the industrial revolution.

The developers are more deliberate. In this rush-to-the-Web frenzy, they are discovering more questions than answers. They are asking how to present material, what online devices such as interactive problem sets, online quizzes, animated graphics, and voice narrated slide shows will actually work and at what cost. They are asking, for example, if the chat room encourages meaningful dialogue or meaningless drivel. Even the ideal "semester" length for online courses has been called to question.

All the while the large body of educators is standing firmly skeptical. In recent reviews of a new online course, the reviewers confirmed that the course was good, that they would have little trouble using it, and that it has all the right material, but that the body of their colleagues would likely be resistant to using it. Can it be just natural aversion to what is new? More likely, it is that the online courses suggest an end to the speech-from-the-teach style that has dominated learning for much of history. The teacher, no longer at stage-center of the learning process, must stand aside in a supporting role. This is difficult to accept, for many teachers whose ego systems and pedagogical beliefs are structured around their central role. What is the greatest surprise is that online education enhances the teacher’s role. Rather than reciting 45 hours of chalk-talk every semester, the teacher’s time is spent on the more valuable job of working with students individually and in groups or giving short highly focused lessons on just the most troubling points for students.

The fundamental fact is that online education is in its infancy, and that is because computer and communications technology have just reached the necessary sophistication to imitate many of the traditional teaching functions. By comparing the past five centuries of textbook development, call this print technology, it is easy to understand that a new medium with scarcely ten years of effort is only just beginning to find its way. None the less, technology is knocking at the door of the teaching profession, as it has for many others.

Those who have tried know it is a daunting task. Yet this is not fully understood by everyone. I have heard a couple of horror stories of department chairs simply assigning a faculty member to put a course online. When the faculty member is just a spreadsheet/word processor type like most of us, this is a frightfully unrealistic task but more importantly it reveals how little is known about how.

In this issue, two approaches to the human interaction issues are presented. George M. McKelvy was hired just three years ago by the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry of Georgia Tech specifically for the purpose of generating online materials for their chemistry students. He has pioneered the use of voice/video - from finding the money, to directing, producing and script writing - to enhance the Chemistry Laboratory experience. His results are remarkable. In a second article, Lawrence E. Levine of Stevens Institute of Technology explains how voice narrated slide shows have been an effective way to give students a stronger sense of interactivity, therefore reaching closer to students. In the third article, Jonathan Lewin of Kennesaw State University explains a new technique of teaching mathematics --- without transparencies, without chalk, and without prepared handouts.

The major problem to be overcome is the fact that there is no easy way to write mathematics in Power Point. However, I have been using Scientific Notebook with my students as an integral part of the math courses that I teach, and writing mathematics in SNB is very easy. Unfortunately, one cannot directly import the .tex created by SNB into Power Point. The solution that I worked out was to capture portions of the SNB file as graphics files. These can then be imported into Power Point as .gif or jpeg files to create slides. It does require some editing of the graphics files as well as preparing the SNB file so that it uses only half of the page space in SNB (about 3 inches as opposed to the default of 6 inches or so).

Thus the entire procedure is as follows:

1. Prepare the problem and its solution in SNB.
2. Capture portions of the file as graphics files with say Lview or something equivalent.
3. Import these files into Power Point using Insert, Picture, From File
4. Create a cover page for the slide show in Power Point.
5. Add narration to the slide show using Slide Show, Record Narration.
6. Use the Real Presenter add-on under Tools to convert the slide show to .rm format
7. Upload the slide show to the server.
8. Build a link in an html page to the show.

It is worth noting that the conversion from Power Point to .rm format involves a compression factor of about 1/80, so that the .rm file is not that large compared to the rather large Power Point slide show with narration.

Almost all of the slide shows take less then 4 minutes to view. This is intentional, since I do not believe that students are willing to spend large amounts of time viewing solutions. All but two of them are meant as supplements to the normal lecture format. The fact that they are available 7 days a week 24 hours a day from anywhere is a big advantage for students.

The purpose of this article is to describe some of the innovative instructional techniques that I have developed, both in the classroom and in the design of my books, with the help of the unique features of the software product (http://www.mackichan.com). Broadly speaking, these features can be summed up as follows:

1. The heart of Scientific Notebook} is a scientific word processor that supports both text and mathematical symbols. Documents can be printed as hard copy; or they may be constructed as hypertext for reading on the computer screen.
2. Scientific Notebook has web browsing capabilities. When given a command to Open Location to a file with extension tex that is located in a website, Scientific Notebook opens that file directly. The reader has the option to save the file locally, after which he/she may make free use of the editing features to revise the document. For some further information about the process of publishing mathematical material on websites with the aid Scientific Notebook, see my article on this subject at:

These three features have made it possible to develop an entirely new lecturing technique and have made it possible to produce a new kind of mathematics textbook.

I no longer use a blackboard and, in fact, I have not touched a piece of chalk for several years. I teach in a lecture room that is equipped with an LCD projector (a Proxima 5800) and a connection to the Kennesaw State University network that connects me to the Internet by a T1 line. I carry my laptop computer into the classroom with me. Before the class begins I connect my laptop to the projector and to the campus network. I sit at the front of the room with my laptop facing my students. I look at the display on my computer and the students see the same display on the projection screen behind me. In addition to Scientific Notebook, I also use the following software products in the classroom:

1. Windows Paint for making quick and easy low grade drawings.
   
2. Micrografx Designer
   
3. WS_FTP

Since Scientific Notebook is installed on the computers in the Kennesaw State University computer labs, I do not have to require my students to have their own computers. However, about four out of five of my students do have their own machines and almost all of these have Internet connections. My textbooks provide the reader with a CD that contains a 30 day timelock version of Scientific Notebook and also the free Scientific Notebook Viewer. I\ find that a significant number of my students buy the software and this number seems to be increasing. Kennesaw State University is a commuter school and most of my students prefer to leave campus as soon as their classes are over. Thus they have an incentive to set up their home computers with the software so as to avoid having to go to the computer lab.

I have to admit that I found the prospect of typing in front of other people rather intimidating the first day I walked into the lecture room with my laptop. But I soon became accustomed to the process and today I feel more comfortable with my laptop than I ever felt at the blackboard. I can type my lecture notes with much greater ease, greater speed and greater clarity than I ever could write them during my blackboard days and I have found that I can display many more working steps.

Because I am actually writing the lecture materials as I teach, I can be as spontaneous as I used to be in my blackboard days. On the other hand, I can also open the on-screen version of the text and so I am able to point at material that I am about to instruct the students to read and I can point at exercises that I am assigning as homework. I frequently paste a block of exercises from the text into the lecture notes and, having done so, I can discuss some of the exercises in detail leaving others for the students to work on their own.

When I want to draw graphs I use the graph drawing features of Scientific Notebook and then I convert each graph into an imported picture so that it should be visible to those who are using the free on their home computers. Other drawings are made with Windows Paint or with Designer.

At the end of each lecture, I save my document, open Windows Explorer and, using the Explorer features of WS\_FTP, I drag the document into the appropriate place in my website. From this moment, the lecture notes can be displayed on screen or printed on any computer with an Internet connection running Scientific Notebook or the free viewer.

At the beginning of each of my courses I give two or three of my lectures in one of the computer labs. In this way, I am able to give the students hands-on experience with the process of opening documents both locally and from my website, writing in a Scientific Notebook document and performing Maple operations.

• I am able to face my students at all times.

• I am able to give clear and complete lecture notes and I can expect all students to have a complete set of notes and to know what I have covered even if they have been absent from the lecture.

• The process of writing in a Scientific Notebook document provides me with many opportunities to explain technical points that I think are much harder to explain at the blackboard. I have presented many papers at meetings and workshops at meetings and on high school, college and university campuses to elaborate on these opportunities.

• I have instant access to Maple while I am teaching. Thus, if a particular type of manipulation is not central to the material I am teaching I can let Maple do the work and, in this way, can save valuable time and energy.

• The process of writing in a Scientific Notebook document requires much more attention to proper layout of the work than is traditional on many blackboards and provides me with an opportunity to teach my students how to write mathematics in a clear, complete and organized manner.

Some of my students gain the erroneous impression that coming to class is no longer important. How wrong they are! I have to beg, plead and threaten to overcome this tendency.

Students are not always sure what, if anything, they should be writing during the lectures. I find it necessary to explain to them that they should definitely be writing something; even though there is no need to attempt to write a complete set of notes. Their personal written notes will complement the lecture notes that I am producing on my computer. At the same time, the process of writing keeps them from dozing off.

Although the vast majority of my students are more than happy with my lecturing technique, every mathematics course contains some who are not managing the material. Any innovative approach is vulnerable in the sense that an unhappy student may attempt to make a scapegoat of it to cover for some other more deep seated problem.

This year, for the second year, we are running our summer school project for gifted and talented high school students. We feel this a wonderful application of WebCalC. These students are among the most enthusiastic students you’ll ever see. Most will be entering their senior high school year in the fall, though a few are sophomores. They work hard, both in the class setting and at home. Most of them cover about a half-semester’s material in just four weeks. They get to learn calculus from the newest venue available, the Internet.

This summer the students will meet for two hours, three times a week, for four weeks. We are adapting some of the strategies we’ve learned from teaching WebCalC to college students for the past three semesters. Namely, we make the course very task-oriented. Each day the students will be given specific tasks in the form of worksheets or take home quizzes. Students get to work on them immediately. This strategy has been very effective in focusing the student’s attention "like a laser beam" to the material at hand. A detailed, daily syllabus is also available. We have found that with no daily lecture, students are sometimes at a loss about what to do when then come to class. (I never realized that a great part of my job in traditional teaching was acting as the course metronome. But that’s just what the lecturer does, keeps up the pace.) Students that complete the session are presented a certificate, and their local high school math teacher and principal are notified.

We have noticed two remarkable side benefits from watching students work in this new format. First, spontaneous group learning takes place. Students help one another and work together in groups of two, three, and sometimes four. The teacher is often asked questions from a small group. The other is that many students, but not all, tend to become resourceful about finding what they need and doing what needs to be done. This is independence, and of course, having students that are independent workers is every teacher’s dream.

Most of you that have used Scientific Notebook realize how easy it is to produce really excellent looking mathematics. There are dozens of ways to make it look better make it easier to use. Here are a couple of tips related to user specified substitutions. How to make

look better.

• Strongly motivated --- self starters,
  
• Hearing or visually impaired, or otherwise handicapped,
  
• Intellectually mature and those home-schooled.
  

• Have low mathematics pretest scores,
  
• Are generally unmotivated,
  
• Need the classroom environment.

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