Archive for May, 2009

Gaussian distribution

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

Ruth’s been clearing out and found an old 10 Mark note. I could not resist scanning the detail with the Normal distribution on the front face next to the portrait of Gauss.

Graph questions for revision

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Download a PDF file containing a four page worksheet with graph plotting questions.

Trigonometry question on reader survey

Saturday, May 23rd, 2009

A tale of two solutions.

Wolfram Alpha

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

A search engine for Maths. You can type things like “y = (x+1)(x-1)x” or “weather Birmingham UK 2008” and get graphs and data. You can type a search term like “x^3 – 2x = 10” and the system will solve the equation exactly or approximately and draw graphs.

Mobile web

Friday, May 15th, 2009

I’ve changed over to the Bodmas minimal theme, based on ‘Zero’ while I test out an HTC TyTN phone on loan from the College. I’m trying to push the idea of a mobile phone as an e-learning material acquisition platform. More soon.

Bitfrost

Friday, May 15th, 2009

“The crux of the problem lies in the assumption that any program executing on a system on the user’s behalf should have the exact same abilities and permissions as any other program executing on behalf of the same user.”
OLPC wiki entry for bitfrost

Nice page on the security model built into sugar, the operating system [...]

Metric Units starter

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Download a metric units quiz. One side of A4 with a question where students match a measurement of an object (weight of new born baby, height of typical door) with the corresponding value (3Kg, 2 metres). Then the students have to find objects in the room that are various sizes. Finally some questions involving simple [...]

Algebra: simplifying expressions

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Algebra The BasicsView more presentations from keithpeter.

Click on Full Screen View on the slideshare.net player above (bottom right of the player, icon looks like a projector screen) to use on your interactive whiteboard.

Just one side of A4 on simplifying expressions, including collecting terms, multiplying terms, cancelling down algebraic fractions, and multiplying out brackets. Needs directed [...]

And so it goes

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

“He and his unit had saved their sweet rations and were holding a Christmas party for local Berlin children. As he lifted a young boy on to a chair, he saw the child had only one arm. With a sickening flash he realised that only three years earlier the Allies had bombed the very people [...]

(E) Learning: people and content

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

A University teacher called Cath Ellis posted her 10 Commandments of e-learning on a blog. Clive Shepherd (a free lance e-learning specialist working for companies) picked up on that post and put forward his 10 principles. Cath is working from a model of e-learning that is discussion based, Clive (deliberately) took a contrasting view based [...]

10 numeracy questions

Friday, May 8th, 2009

Just 10 questions a bit like the Level 1 numeracy test with answers.

Something is cooking

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Mark Bernstein is working on ‘a prototype of a new system’. That conjurers up images of sketchbooks, cafe tables with pots of coffee, and afternoon storm light.

I’ll need to stay with Mac OS just to see what it is. I was hoping to go totally open source this year. Tinderbox is one of the [...]

Plain Vanilla

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Vanilla is a simple and rather basic forum script that runs on a Web server and needs a MySQL database and PHP (MySQL 3.23+ and PHP 4.1+). I had an instance working in about 5 minutes. The very basic functionality can be extended using plug-ins. In particular the rather ace autolinks plug in will automatically [...]

Old computers

Monday, May 4th, 2009

Linux allows you to use old hardware with a current, relatively secure operating system and the usual applications. I’ve put Ubuntu 9.04 on the Linux partition of my old Dell laptop mainly because of the Network Manager that has appeared in Ubuntu since 8.10. Networking Just Works with a range of WiFi cards and, [...]