Wikibooks is a project for collaborative development of books online.  The focus is on developing free electronic textbooks that students and teachers can use. More than 1,000 books are in various stages of development for just about every imaginable subject. Looking at Physics, for example, there are four high school physics book projects currently underway, as well as 17 undergraduate and five graduate level projects. … Continue reading Write Your Own Textbook

You can quickly and easily create nice-looking graphs at the Students’ Classrom Create a Graph site. Sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics, this easy-to-use site allows you to create all kinds of different graphs to help visually represent complex data. When you’re finished, you can print your graph, download it in one of a number of different formats, or email it to yourself. … Continue reading Fast Graphs

This is the second in a series of posts about podcasts for teaching and learning. A number of podcasts are available to help supplement classroom instruction in a variety of areas. This time, we’ll look at math. The Mathgrad Podcast discusses everyday math for everyday people. The goal is to discuss the mathematics behind many real life topics in a way that even the worst … Continue reading Math Podcasts

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. I’m so used to listening to podcasts that I regularly try to pause or rewind the radio. It’s a little embarassing when I catch myself changing the radio station by mistake. It just seems natural that I should be able to back it up and replay something I missed or wanted to hear again. It doesn’t help … Continue reading Time Shifting

The debate has been going on since IBM introduced the personal computer in 1981. The PC used an Intel processor, an open architecture, and an operating system made by Microsoft. All of this was very different from the popular Apple II. Isaac and Ishmael went their separate ways, and the war began. The debate has continued for the last 25 years, and has really heated … Continue reading Why I Hate Macs

This is the first in a series of items about how existing podcasts can be used to supplement classroom instruction in various subject areas. One of the natural applications that comes to mind is in the area of foreign language. In many cases, we teach foreign language in an immersive environment. The German teachers exclusively use German in their classes. Sometimes, students become very frustrated … Continue reading Podcasts for Teaching Foreign Language

This past winter, our school district was bit by the podcasting bug. A lot of people were very interested in the technology, and immediately saw all kinds of applications for it. We could podcast our morning announcements. We could podcast board meetings. The principal could podcast messages to the students and parents. We could podcast staff development sessions. We could podcast physics lectures. We could … Continue reading Training Wheels

Bartleby is a suprisingly useful collection of resources. Named after the scrivener (or copyist) in Melville’s story, the site publishes classic books online as well as preeminent contemporary reference works. The collection includes several encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, and fact books. It also has collections of quotations (including Bartlett’s). The 1914 Oxford Shakespeare and the King James Bible round out the reference works. The verse section … Continue reading I Would Prefer Not To

One definition of "Web 2.0" is the concept of an online computing platform. Instead of installing programs and running them on your computer, you simply go to a web site and use an online version of the program there. The idea of using a program on the web instead of installing it on your computer has several advantages. It’s much easier, because you don’t have … Continue reading The Online Office

In the Harry Potter books, the pictures all move. The people in the portraits can move from one painting to another. The pictures in the newspaper are moving. Even the trading cards that come with the chocolate frogs have animated pictures. I wonder, though, why they have a Daily Newspaper. Surely, if they have the technology (technology and magic are the same thing) to animate … Continue reading Harry Potter and the Magic Post-It Note

A couple weeks ago, we had Alvin Trusty in to speak to the staff about teaching with technology. He touched on a lot of different topics in his presentation, including the Ohio Academic Content Standards for technology, the need for teachers to keep up with new technologies, and several web 2.0 applications. Many of the teachers reported later that they were overwhelmed by the presentation. … Continue reading Overwhelming

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