Reminiscing about Chalk!

I jokingly say that one of the reasons that I became a teacher was because I loved writing on the chalkboard! Remember the days when it was a treat to write on the classroom chalkboard? And being allowed to use the "special" colored chalk? Oh my!
Or if you were especially good, you were picked to stay after school, and "help" the teacher by cleaning the erasers...you leaned out the window as far as you could so as to not let the flying bits of chalk back into the classroom, you took one eraser in each hand, and you beat those erasers against each other to get them "clean". I remember how much I enjoyed teaching and using my chalk....

 And then came whiteboards! Boy, did I miss my chalk...it took me awhile to get used to carrying around my markers and jealously guarding them so that I could have "juicy" markers when I needed them. I did come to love the versatility of using the board itself as a projection surface for my graph paper transparencies...and I could draw graphs in different colors....

And now...drumroll please...I've discovered bamboo tablets (someone PLEASE explain why they are called bamboo...were they designed in the Orient???) So in my EDU 255 class, I am clicking on my instructors blog links and I come across a link to a conference where the speaker, a sixth grade math teacher from California, is facilitating screencast videos of his students doing mini-math lessons using Camtasia and a tablet PC. And the teacher explains that similar results can be achieved "on a budget" by using a Wacom tablet. (What is a Wacom tablet, I think and start to do research...and they are quoting me $400 etc...and I say wow, no way....) Mathtrain.tv

And then coincidentally, I'm emailing the math dean at the college and saying how I would love to make screencasts of myself showing the solutions to math problems so that I could email them to students, but don't know how to achieve that...how to get my writing on the computer screen so that it can be captured and Dean says, "Well why don't you use a bamboo tablet? The math department will buy one for you!"....WHAT??

So here I am a couple of days later...I have borrowed a bamboo tablet from the TELS office, I'm googling math and technology and find yes..a FREE whiteboard program...so now with my bamboo tablet and my whiteboard program, I can write on my computer screen......AND There are just not enough hours in the day to play with my new "toy"....and my mind is busy thinking of all the ways I could use this....

So here it is...my first video "testing" my new toy........Come to think of it...maybe I can find free chalkboard software!!!