As community moderator at our mathematical literacy teacher community (www.mathsliteracy.ning.com) I see my main role as facilitator of relationships and communications as well as technical support person within the community. Within this context I have actually learn so much, in unexpected areas. One of my community members posed a question starting off with ” This must be the dumbest question…” and that lead to me having a wondeful new learning experience!

She wanted to draw a system of axes (with grid) to use in her linear programming worksheet where the learners could sketch on the grid. So I immediately jumped to the occation by uploading a ‘How to’:

We tend to want to remedy situations by offering help too fast and she then gently reminded me that she is working in the new WORD 2007. So I went to investigate if I could do it in Word 2007. I have been avoiding getting to know it as it looks so different from Word 2003 and the times that I tried to figure it out, I got quite frustrated. So I forced myself…

What a pleasant surprise! It got oodles of nice features and once you get over your innitial abhorance, I found myself getting around quite effortlessly. My only worry is that I will now have to retrain my teachers to use the new Word from scratch…

So the moral of this story is that we must not be scared to learn new stuff even if the “old stuff” were so familiar and comfortable. If we don’t we, might be missing out on wonderful new features…. I do realise that TIME is a big problem. So I have made a little tutorial to demonstrate how to do a system of axes with gridlines in Word 2007.

To download, click here

We will be using Edublogger to create our blog. These instructions will be good for any wordpress powered blog as well. You may also download the powerpoint, which will give you the animations in a more step by step way. Just pause the slideshow to follow the instructions…

Creating a blog (1):  You will learn how to..

• Register with Edublogger, activate your blog and how to change your password.

[slideshare id=163606&doc=setting-up-a-blog-edublogger-1194891617968098-5&w=425]
Download Slideshow

Creating a blog (2):  You will learn how to…

• Change the theme (”Look & Feel”) of your blog
• Set up general settings (your blog title and tagline, timesettings, which page your blog should open on, comment notifications)
• Do your first post
  • Post settings
  • Inserting a picture

[slideshare id=183077&doc=setting-up-a-blog-part-2-1196203979355978-2&w=425]
Download Powerpoint

Creating a blog (3):  You will learn how to…

• create a banner (header) for your new blog!

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Download slideshow

I am here today with some wonderful Curriculum advisors from Limpopo and we are teaching one another how to draw figures in Word. In the “old days” we would just “cut and paste” (as with scizzors and glue) our maths figures into our papers, which resulted in us not really being able to use the resource effectively again. So today we will do it in our papers!

For a step by step guide on how to do this, click here

I will link all my Microsoft Word resources from here.

Begining Word
Intermediate Word
Creating sketches with Autoshape

Beginning Word

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And a slightly more advanced version:

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