life;

... now this is professional development the way I like it; made this video of a linear life scenario with screentoaster. ah, good times, good times.

HP Elite Books

So, we got these HP Elite Book Tablets; they are pretty sweet.

Here is a doodle i did with gimp.

This one I made with TuxPaint along with my daughter. There is a tux line of software from games, counting, math etc. check them out.

This is a piecewise function made with Graph Calc another free program. Seems to have some potential.

• HP Web Cam ~ You can also take pictures and video with the web cam using the HP Web Cam application; found in Start\All Programs\HP\HP Web Cam.


• OpenOffice ~ an alternative to Microsoft Office. I prefer its mathematics typesetting options to the word equation editor, and mathtype.


• Chrome ~ web browser. I like the chrome interface, easy to search, new tabs have a lib of recently/commonly visited pages. I used it all day in school Friday, no problems with powerschool or gradebook.


• MiKTeX ~ a mathematical typesetting engine, based on TeX (by Donald Knuth), it provides a front end for working the system and creating pdf documents with beautiful mathematics. Works on both mac and win.

• Audacity ~ audio recording/mixing tool that does lots. In specific you can make podcasts :).

Dan Meyer: Math Class Needs a Makeover

I found Dan's talk compelling. I always wonder why the students can sometimes remember processes and sometimes not, but all the students that fit into the not category; do not have a sense of where they are going and trying to get to with a problem. Dan gets it right, he tells how the students do not own there mathematical knowledge, and they do not embrace problem solving.

MassCUE Conference ideas

After going to the MassCUE conference, I came away with a bunch of things to think about relating to computers and education. Specifically there are lots of different ways for students to collaborate and lots of tools that can facilitate that process.

First go here: http://prezi.com/obqzirjhtf-q/ and play the presentation. It's very cool (skip past the video if you wish).

Second, some sites that looked interesting that people may want to check out are posted below:

http://www.gapminder.org/ - 4-Dimentional graphs (2-D graphs with the addition of color, and time)
http://prezi.com/ - non-linear online presentations, a very cool replacement for powerpoint, but it may cost.
http://www.edmodo.com/ - a sort of self-contained, password protected version of facebook for your classroom
http://www.polleverywhere.com/ - a cell phone replacement for the automatic class polling systems
http://www.wikispaces.com/ - your own classbased wiki

Eric

Lecture Notes / Study Guide

Here is a relatively simple process to give your students the ability to review there notes with the benefit of the lecture, or overview of the lecture.

In this example I just broke my lecture down to one example, and gave the students a brief overview of the process at hand.

1. Digital Camera
2. Digital Voice Recorder
Full disclosure I did have to convert the audio file to mp3.
[ command line: ffmpeg -i input.wma -ab 32 output.mp3 ]

3. Upload materials to wiki:
Inequality Lesson Overview

Skills (l33t and otherwise)

A number of months back Jen posted a list of her tech-related skills. I don't know if others are interested in such a list, but I can make a stab at mine (keep in mind that there are a bunch of things on Jen's list, like html code and unix, that I used to know, but haven't used in a decade or so, so I've basically forgotten it all and I'm not listing it here).

Equipment:
The 145 lab
The datastudio interface boxes (science)
general projector stuff

Software:
MS Word
Excel (basics)
PowerPoint (basics)
PowerTeacher
Graphical Analysis
Virtual Physics
Interactive Physics
Earth Centered Universe
Starry Night Pro
DataStudio
Mimio (basic)

Platforms
Windows (basic)


Programming/Markup languages
I've done stuff with Basic, C and Pascal, but not in a long time

Web things
Searching. (how to use Google image search, e.g.)
Web 2.0: Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Google: Earth, Maps, igoogle
Webassign
PBS.org

Project types
Webquest
Powerpoints
Virtual labs
Computer based data collection

Eric Howard

Get others to grade for you

For those of you, especially in the science and math departments, who are interested, Webassign provides an online homework service that some physics and chemistry teachers in the high school are presently using.

Teachers can create classes for free, while students must pay a fee for their account. Once you set up a class, you link a textbook to your class and can then assign homework problems from your textbook. The site randomizes numbers in the problems so that each student has to give a different answer, even though they are assigned the same problem. The site allows for a wide range of options in the number of submissions allowed, the numerical accuracy required etc. Some of the textbooks allow you to assign the example problems as interactive exercises as well.

There are a large number of textbooks for chemistry, mathematics and physics, with smaller numbers available for accounting, astronomy, biology, engineering, social studies, and statistics.

I've been using the site for a few years now, so if you are interested, feel free to stop by and ask.

Eric