free online room planner

One of my "stumbleupons" came up with this: roomfulexpress

It's an online room / space planner.

This would be a great way to map out your classroom or school office and it works nicely with IWB's. Gives your students the overhead perspective on things.

It also has some nice outdoor objects, prints without logging in doesn't save unless you set up an account. Also all measurements are in feet and inches - so a maths activity to convert to metric would be in order.

The IWB upgraded

We have seen this coming but I didn't think it would be quite this soon...

Samsung has released a 64" touch panel that when you look at TCO and intallation costs would give most interactive whiteboards a run for the money...



From their website...

The exciting new 650TS touch screen for education is a must have for any classroom. Combining the simplicity of a whiteboard and the power of a computer, the Samsung 650TS eBoard will enhance almost any learning environment. The exciting new 650TS touch screen will increase student participation, provide better visual presentation and therefore create a better learning environment. The 650TS eBoard occupies less space than other interactive boards. It has low power consumption and can even deliver high-quality images under the brightest lighting condition. The lifespan of the 650TS LCD panel is approximately 50,000 hours (or about 30 years when used 6 hours a day).

Not exactly portable as an eBeam and projector set up. But certainly for a fixed installation this is the next step in providing display and interactive technology in the classroom.

For more information -

The cool thing is that we now sell them from our office. Can't wait to get my hands on a demo unit.

Making your own iwb content

Seems I've taken a holiday from my blog...

Unfortunately I wasn't on holiday... I've been working harder than ever before at my current job as well as a few home projects which I'll show later when I get them a bit further along.

I had an author contact me recently - she was looking for a way to create here own interactive whiteboard resource to go with some picture books that she has written.

Now back in the day I used to use Authorware, Director and Flash to generate interactive multimedia, but that is now over 10 years ago and I have not kept up my skills.

So I went on the hunt for easy to use cheap/free tools to create stand alone multimedia packages that included basic computer based training stuff like quiz es, cloze, matching and drag and drop type activities.

So here is what I found

CourseLab - This is the system we are going to use. Nice interface, no coding if you don't want to and easy to use. Best of all it's free.Image via Wikipedia

LAMS - more server based but again easy to use and set up - Free too

Xerte - More coding than what I would like - but would be really good once you get your head around.

eXe - Easy to use but not enough "fun" stuff for our purposes (storybook), but for secondary and tertiary courses this is very quick and easy. Again free.

Ebeam demonstration Video

I find this a little funny but is seems that SmartBoard is getting to be a generic term...

This comes from www.smartboardsreviews.com

It's good once again to see customer using our products and being able to get going so quickly.

I like his closing comment.

ARS/SRS in Higher Education

Queensland University of Technology has released a "Take5" video on the use of keepads in their Business studies courses. It's nice to see one of our clients working with the technology to get better outcomes for their students.

A lot of what she says can be used within a primary and seconday based environment as well.

Graphing mathematics - Free CAS

There was a discussion on echalk today regarding a school's migration to Apple Macs and how their maths teachers were resisting the change so they could still use FX Draw on their PC's so that they could create graphical functions for printing and class use.

I was immediatly interested why they would still use a paid for program when there were quite a few free and open source alternatives.

So here is the list I came up with that were free and cross platform.


Going from simple to complex....

the open source Mac / PC - Maths Trax from NASA

http://prime.jsc.nasa.gov/mathtrax/index.html

the open source cross platform geogebra (my favourite)

http://www.geogebra.org

or the open source cross platform C.A.R Metal

http://db-maths.nuxit.net/CaRMetal/index_en.html

or if you really want to freak them out - the free open source cross platform Maxima and Sage

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

http://www.sagemath.org/

Make your own games! Serious Games

A lot has been said for "Serious Gaming", where there is an educational purpose for playing the game. These have been used for a wide range of educational contexts, and even TurningPoint ARS can be used as a game platform.

I was having a scan through Sourceforge and came across this little beauty - e-adventure

Cross platform for both the development and games means that games can be written once, played by users on different platforms. Because it is written in JAVA there is also the possibility to push them to iPhones and android based devices.

There are a range of pre-made games to check out as well as comprehensive help files.

I you ever wanted to make a point and click adventure story or get you students to demonstrate what they have learned this might be the tool to have a look at. Take a look at the video to get an idea of what it is all about.