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!

     

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!

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.