Life, Learning, and Enlightenment

I often find myself working with clients for whom math is their most difficult subject. Usually, this is because the teacher isn’t reaching them due to differences between how most math is presented and how these students learn.

The educational service center in Southwest Georgia has compiled quite a collection of graphic organizers from the teachers in their service area and have posted them online for us all to benefit from.

Take a look at their Mathematics Page to see what might benefit you!

When teaching electronics, students often find themselves wishing that they could practice more outside of class. This is often difficult due to the equipment required to build and measure electronic circuits.

The University of Colorado has developed a library of interactive simulations that run in any java enabled browser. There are simulations covering a variety of math and science related topics, including electronics.

For our purposes, there are a variety of circuit related simulations that can be used to build both AC and DC circuits. There are also some interesting simulations for learning Ohm’s Law and for working with resistance in a wire.

Best of all, you can use these tools online or download them to use any time. All you need is a good web browser with Java enabled!

     

Some students have problems visualizing the application of Ohm’s Law and the equations for voltage, current, resistance, and power. If you work best with visuals, or if you’d just like a place to check your work*, take a look at the Ohm’s Law Calculators available at http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/page2.asp.

*The use of these tools to get homework and practice answers will not help make you smarter or promote understanding! Do your own work first!

Last week, I started teaching a new semester of basic electronics at St. Philips College. The first thing we talk about is scientific notation as it applies to metric notation. As part of my teaching process, I build a number line to visually illustrate the relationships between the powers of ten and their metric equivalent.

This time, one of my students, David Solfest, shared the mnemonic that he learned for the negative exponents and made up a new one for the positive exponents.

On the positive exponent side of the number line, reading from left to right, the mnemonic is “Ten (Tera) Grey (Giga) Mountain (Mega) kats (kilo).” Moving to the negative exponent side of the number line you have “my (milli) mom (micro) nits (nano) pelts (pico).”

For some, just memorizing the number line is enough to promote storage of this information in long term memory, but others need something like the mnemonic devices that David came up with. Either way, this is a great tool for learning the different values associated with metric notation!

Some of my students this semester have become interested in Linux and have expressed an interest in learning the command line and becoming more proficient with the inner workings of this operating system. This is something I’ve been interested in as well, so I thought I’d take a few moments here to talk about the tools I’ve found most helpful with this issue.

First of all, there is a really cool, Ubuntu-based distribution called INX (Is Not X), which boots from a live CD and includes a bunch of real time tutorials as well as all the basic apps to be a real distribution. Just click on the image below to check it out for yourself.

For those who want other options, there are two that I like quite a bit. The folks over at LinuxCommand.org have set up a nice online tutorial that is informative, nice to look at, and easy to use.

Finally, M.Stonebank, from Surrey, has set up a UNIX tutorial that you can use online or download for offline use. I thought that was a cool idea so I mirrored it HERE for those of you that can find me easier than the bookmark for the original site. If you want to download it for use offline, you’ll need to follow the link to his site and get it from there.

Happy Learning!

Here’s a cool tool for checking that large number multiplication or division. Its a MS Excel spreadsheet set up to do either multiplication or division. I don’t, of course, advocate the use of this tool instead of working the problem yourself, but its a good way to check your work.

This MS Excel spreadsheet should work fine with open source alternatives that can open and edit .xls files, including OpenOffice.org and Gnumeric.

Just click on the screenshot below to download the spreadsheet in .zip format, ready to decompress and use!

I was searching for some help and additional information on factoring polynomials for a client last night and found three websites that I thought I would share.

ThinkQuest is a place where teachers and students can go to build their own information sources. I didn’t spend a lot of time learning about who they are and what they do, but one section of the site is called Math for Morons, and it has some really good info on the topic I was searching at http://library.thinkquest.org/20991/alg2/polyf.html.

I also found a cool source of FREE Mathematics tutorials and worksheets at http://www.analyzemath.com/.

Finally, the West Texas A&M Universtity has a Virtual Math Lab that contains some interesting and helpful information.

Please leave feedback via comment or the Question Form and let me know how these resources worked for you and your algebra issues.

This MS Excel spreadsheet can be used to set and compute grades for all your classes!

The directions are on the front page and its pretty self explanatory. You should be able to use this tool with any application that can open MS Excel spreadsheets, including OpenOffice.org Calc and Gnumeric.

Just click on the screenshot below to download the grade tracker in .zip format.

As some of you know, I’m one of those people who earned the title ‘geek’ way back in the days when we broke more computers than we fixed. After working with different operating systems and computer types over the years, and teaching computer maintenance and networking for over 10 years now, I still don’t understand how we’ve managed to back ourselves so completely into the Microsoft corner.

Don’t get me wrong, M$ Windows is a very robust and powerful operating system. But its not for everyone. I had an experience this week that made me stop and think, once again, about the differences.

I’ve spent several days this past week working on some web updates and upgrades for a special client and dear friend. She has an awesome website full of resources built around Microsoft’s ASP code. Her blogging efforts have grown to the point that she needs to run multiple blogs, with some add-on stuff, all at once on her host.

Now, what you may not know is that what we now call the internet was originally spawned from a group of UNIX servers and that the higher market share of web servers and applications is still UNIX based via Linux servers and open source applications. Free, community supported, and powerful. This of course, was back before the wizards in Seattle realized that the internet was going to be more than a fad.

So, Microsoft’s new Internet Information Server, IIS7, supports PHP code, which now allows us to run things like Wordpress on Microsoft servers. But here’s the problem; the good folks in Bill Gatesland believe that they know better than we do, that we can’t be trusted to make our own choices and, as they have since the days of NT, have provided a product that is essentially locked down by default, requiring network admin intervention for even the simplest changes.

I called a couple different Windows web hosts today, after getting an awesome run-around from the current one, and they all said essentially the same thing. They can go in and edit file and folder attributes for me, but it will take time. I can’t do it myself. They have to do it for me. We’re talking about a quick chmod edit on an open source system that I have to beg for on a Windows server.

Am I the only on that thinks there’s something wrong with this?

When my kids were trying to learn the states and capitals in middle school, I stumbled across Wakko’s America. Since then, Yakko has gotten in on the fun with his own songs about the world and the universe.

Just click on the links to listen or download them for yourself or your kids!