Tuesday afternoon at 4:20 — I took my iBook to the Cambridge Apple Store, having made an appointment earlier in the day at the so-called Genius Bar. (CDs and DVDs were ejecting less than 50% of the time. Worse yet,… Read More ›
Technology
Finally TiVo
So we finally gave in and got a TiVo box. I think it was a recommendation by Ira Glass that did the track. Most of the setup was painless, but it’s been very frustrating trying to connect it to our… Read More ›
The soul-stealing iPod and fuzzy math
Does the iPod steal music’s soul? Do these numbers make sense? Here are the views of Tony Brummel, founder of Victory Records: iTunes “makes music disposable. It makes it a faceless impulse item. It steals its soul,” according to Macworld… Read More ›
Bill Gates Redux
We don’t have to like Bill Gates, and we certainly don’t have to like Microsoft, but we do have to admit that Gates has changed. He’s making an impact by doing fine work as a philanthropist, and occasionally he’s even… Read More ›
Security through obscurity
So how do you hide a password in plain sight when it doesn’t need to be particularly secret? For instance, imagine that you are using a hard-copy textbook for which the publisher also provides an online version. And the online… Read More ›
Graphic organizers
Many high-school teachers believe that so-called graphic organizers are helpful to students. Readers who are my age may wonder what a graphic organizer is. According to the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, a graphic organizer is an instructional tool used… Read More ›
Wikipedia's virtues
There has been a flurry of attacks on one of the most useful sites on the Internet: the Wikipedia. It’s the source that I recommend most often for math and computer science. But students tell me that it’s disparaged by… Read More ›
How people get to this page
It’s a bit puzzling to see how various readers found their way to this blog. Looking at the referrers, I wonder at some of the searches. Here are a few examples: Google: rachel, bartlett, chicago Google: venn, diagram, about, bubonic,… Read More ›
God had a deadline
For the second time this year I came across a link to “The Eternal Flame,” a song that speaks to those of us who believe in the power, efficiency, and mathematical insight offered by the Lisp/Scheme/Logo family of computer programming… Read More ›
An unsolicited testimonial
I love my new Neoprene laptop case. It’s soft, it’s extremely lightweight, and it opens up in such a way that it’s remarkably easy to keep the case on while using the computer. What more can I say?
The power of visual representations
In middle- and high-school math classes, we spend a lot of time helping students learn different representations of mathematical relations: words, equations, graphs, tables, etc. One of the big ideas is that a particular representation may be more powerful than… Read More ›
Hacking, not cracking
It says here that “the word the word ‘hack’ may be losing its negative connotations.” Duxbury High School engineering teacher Chris Connors is sponsoring a contest among his students to see who can come up with the best hack. Sounds… Read More ›
Robert Noyce and Bringing Down the House
Usually I’m in the middle of reading two books at once — typically a novel and a non-fiction work. But for some reason I’m currently reading a biography that’s definitely non-fiction and a former best-seller that purports to be non-fiction…. Read More ›
More on the miraculous iPod
This is a follow-up to my post of September 14 concerning my student’s iPod with the picture of Jesus on its screen. First, Keith got himself interviewed by Fox News the other day and showed the iPod on camera; I… Read More ›
A miraculous iPod
One of my ninth-graders accidentally dropped his iPod, and the screen shattered into an image of Jesus! I told him he could probably sell it to the National Enquirer for tens of thousands of dollars, but he decided to sell… Read More ›
FEMA and Internet Explorer
Now that Michael Brown has resigned, maybe we can learn about everything else that’s wrong with FEMA. One thing that’s wrong is that FEMA requires everyone to use Internet Explorer: Hurricane Katrina victims seeking to file claims with the Federal… Read More ›
Showing a calculator to a group
How do you display a calculator to a large group of people, such as a class? Simple if it’s a TI graphing calculator: just download the free Virtual TI, which displays not only the calculator screen but also the entire… Read More ›
Microsoft woes
Our westonmath.org website looked great in Safari on Mac OS X. But then we discovered that Microsoft misinterprets much of the CSS code, so the site looked terrible in Internet Explorer on both Macintosh and Windows. Worse yet, it looked… Read More ›
Wikipedia
My current favorite resource on the Internet is the Wikipedia. Considering that anybody can write and edit its entries, I am astonished that this enormous site could be not only so comprehensive but also so reliable. Of course it contains… Read More ›
Neurological benefits of blogging?
Neurologists Fernette and Brock Eide analyze the Brain of the Blogger. Here are some of their claims: …our mental activities actually cause changes in the structures of our brains — not only what we think, but how we think as… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 