The presentation above on SlideShare shows how I introduce the idea of central tendency or location and the concept of spread or dispersion. Most Level 2 Access Maths get the idea and go on to compare frequency polygons drawn from supplied data sets and from data they collect themselves.
The slide above brings home the idea of spread – I try to find illustrations relevant to the ‘pathway’ (easiest for the health professions students). Vocabulary is important in statistics so look out for some crosswords…
Record My Desktop is a program available in the Ubuntu repositories that, well, makes an OGG video of your desktop. YouTube can handle OGG theora format video files, so the YouTube above shows me taking the walrus in vain. Just a test, expect more once I have cracked sound and how to get Ubuntu to recognise my usb microphone so I can ‘screencast’ Impress presentations.
I used this PowerPoint to introduce the Data Handling module on our level 2 Access Maths module. Some of the ‘custom animations’ on the tree diagram slides don’t work in slideshare so I’ll use copies of the slides to make ‘builds’ in future, especially as I will be using OpenOffice more.
Access to Higher Education courses exist in most FE Colleges as an alternative to taking A levels for mature students. Most of the students I teach are applying for Nursing, Midwifery and health related degrees. A smaller number are applying to teacher training colleges [ we have tried to warn them, but they seem determined, and always say how much they enjoy the placements/visits to local primary schools ].
The ‘mind map’ of topics was supplied as a handout, and students have found this useful to keep track of the topics we have covered and to keep clear the difference between, for example, a scatter diagram, a frequency polygon and the cumulative frequency curve. The process of plotting is very similar in each of these charts (“walk along the corridor and go up the stairs”) but the meaning is very different.
The yellow background is to help a student with a specific requirement. I have another version with a pale blue background for a different class.
The Fluid Blue WordPress theme has a liquid main column width so it suits smaller displays (web books, old monitors in College staff rooms) well. I changed the default blue colour scheme to orange and brown one Sunday afternoon some months ago. I kept the old CSS and just commented them out using ‘//’ at the beginning of the line. Then I added my new Orange/Human colours.
I decided the change the colours back today. Bright Idea, just uncomment the original ones and put ‘//’ characters in front of the orange lines. Worked fine in Firefox, but found that MSIE v6 on Windows XP would not change from orange. Flushed the history and cache. Restarted….
Then the penny dropped: MS Internet Explorer was ignoring the comment characters ‘//’ at the start of each line. When I changed the colours from blue to orange, the site rendered correctly because the orange colours were set last (CSS files are interpreted line by line and the last setting of an attribute wins). When I swapped the comment characters around, the commented out option was below the option I wanted. So MSIE reset the colour to orange.
I need to check what happens in MSIE 7 as well. Many College PCs run MSIE 6 on older hardware. Later versions of Microsoft Explorer support more of the CSS 2 and CSS 3 standards so some quite snazzy layouts will become possible soon.
ScreenToaster is now out of beta testing, and a lot of the sharp edges have been rounded off. ScreenToaster is a Web application that allows you to make screen videos of what you are doing on your computer and share them with others.
I’ve just used it to provide a series of videos of how to build a WebFolio in PebblePad so students who missed the skills session can catch up. Each video is supported by a numbered checklist. It took me around 90 minutes to make the videos and then embed them into the course blog.
I booted a bog standard 15.5 inch Windows laptop from the Ubuntu 8.10 live session cd, then put my Web’n’Walk modem into a usb socket. The notification icon popped up, I clicked on the ‘configure’ option, and chose my country (from a long list). The lower part of the configuration window gave me a choice of networks, so I selected t-mobile. A new connection icon appeared in the upper panel, and I selected the web’n’walk modem. It dialled up and here we are.
My lower vertebrae are going to love this: I can use a cheap and light Web book style computer with the modem when moving around…
I’m still trying to work out how to switch between WiFi and the G3 modem…
“A journalist must be where the action is, not sitting in front of a computor re-writing what someone else (whose competence might be questionable) has allegedly witnessed in far away places, or rehashing some blatant propoganda or innumerable puff pars”
Absolutely, Mr Hadwin, but how do I (and other readers) pay for the journalist? By buying ink on cheap paper? By subscribing to a Web site? By clicking on ad links on a Web page now and again? By buying a periodical book format publication like Granta?
