2 minutes and 28 seconds on multiplying fractions. Recorded as a quick reminder for students on a return to study course.
Produced on my College issue laptop using the free version of the NCH Debut screen and Webcam capture software, and using the cheapo USB microphone (Logitech and Belkin sell the same oem device). Attempts to use the built in microphone on the laptop failed despite the placement of the microphone high up on the screen near the Web cam.
Just bought a cheap laser printer (first time I’ve had a printer at home for around 10 years). Settled on what they had in PC World, a monochrome Samsung ML1640. Installed on my College laptop running Windows XP - put CD in, click some buttons, navigate some menus, restart and then prints. Plugged it into my desktop PC running Ubuntu 9.04. Just found it. Worked.
More maths coming soon! By the way, I’ve been using WordPress to publish this site for just over 5 years now. It was 1.4 I started with I think. Tried 1.22 before then.
I’ve already blogged about the Most Important Key When Presenting with PowerPoint. The next most useful is the B key. Press the B key while presenting, and the screen goes black – your audience have nothing else to look at except you, and that means that you can get a hearing no matter how zappy your slides are. Pressing B again unblanks the screen, restoring your slides. The W key blanks the screen to white, and it strikes me that this could be handy with an interactive whiteboard (make notes on points raised by the students and save them as a notebook/pdf file).
Pressing F1 while presenting brings up the dialogue box above. More detail at Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint blog.
It’s grim, it’s slow, everything’s badly designed and nothing really works properly: using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981. And I wouldn’t change it for the world, because I’m an abject bloody idiot and I hate myself, and this is what I deserve: to be sentenced to Windows for life. Charlie Brooker, Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse?
I quite liked Windows 2000 and Office 2000. They ran quick on my old Dell L400 - really squeezed every cycle out of the hardware – and the system was stable, really solid. Just not a good idea to connect this system to the Internet, but still a vast improvement over the Malignant Edition.
XP was slower, XP SP2 jogged rather than ran, XP SP 3 hobbled and didn’t like the graphics hardware. Debian is a bit like Windows 2000 on the old Dell, except you can connect it to the internet (even using a mobile phone modem).
Perhaps Brooker should try then hate Ubuntu as well? Or pay someone to manage his laptop? Or just get one of these? Set up the bluetooth and use the Google Documents extension and he is away – switches on in seconds, lasts months on a battery charge, and writing published online with a key stroke.
Via Daringfireball.
Download a JQZ file with 20 question MCQ on four functions, number words, and place notation.
Link to Web page that displays a random selection of 10 of the 20 questions.
There is a time limit of 20 minutes on the 10 questions just so my Numeracy students can get used to working against the clock. They can still answer the questions and get feedback after the 20 minutes, just no percentage score.
You can download the Web page and use it on your computer, a shared drive, an intranet or just off a USB stick.
When the Web page opens in Microsoft Internet Explorer, you might get a security warning about ‘scripts and ActiveX content’. Just click on the yellow bar that appears in the Web page, and select ‘allow blocked content’. Don’t click on the ‘X’ at the end of the yellow bar! This warning occurs because the quiz is produced using the excellent Hot Potatoes quiz package, which produces JavaScript code that makes the quiz work. Microsoft Internet Explorer detects the JavaScript program and warns you.
Download a PDF version of a presentation on measurements with photos produced especially
Download a pdf with some group activities about measurement. This set of activities is designed to get people actually measuring and moving around the class. Along the way, they will confront skills such as recording data, making tables to show results, working with Imperial and metric units and comparing them.
Fun with ‘yard sticks’, steel tapes and a wonderfully cheap set of kitchen scales with the most non-linear spring I’ve seen for ages. I might do a screen cast with this one as well…
I was actually quite surprised how strong the parallax effect was when using my small digital camera in macro mode, zoomed out to a medium long focal length. The camera lens was directly over the 5cm/50mm scale mark in the image above, and the two rulers were accurately lined up.
Download a one side handout with some estimation and BODMAS examples used for homework.
This one side homework was produced by copying and pasting from other worksheets I have written over the last few years. Definitely a 20 minute task. We use estimation questions as a way for students to show understanding of the sequence of operations as well.