Posts tagged ‘education’
Khan!
December 6th, 2012 at 8:36 pm by Dr. Drang
I’d like to like Khan Academy. I like its goals. I like how its website works (not surprising, given that John Resig works there). And I like how it makes its videos available in different ways: streaming on its site, streaming on YouTube, and downloadable for playback anytime. But every time I’ve watched a Khan…
iBooks Author
January 22nd, 2012 at 12:44 am by Dr. Drang
Between Kieran Healy, Glenn Fleishman, Andy Ihnatko, and John Siracusa, almost everything I might have said about iBooks Author at this early date has already been said. Kieran and Glenn made the point that we’ve been hearing about computer technology revolutionizing education for decades—Kieran even got off a joke comparing iBooks Author to Encarta, something…
Learning
January 19th, 2012 at 1:17 pm by Dr. Drang
Many years ago when I was a new faculty member, the older guys in the department would tell us youngsters that the best way to learn a topic was to sign up to teach it. They were right. Over the years, I’ve learned some important corollaries to that rule of thumb. Before I go any…
To infinity and beyond
September 8th, 2011 at 9:59 pm by Dr. Drang
Here’s a math problem my sixth-grader came home with last night. You have a bottomless pit with [x] marbles in it. Two of the marbles are black. You reach in and pull out two marbles at random. If [p(x)] is the probability that both marbles are black, what is [\sum_{x=3}^\infty \;p(x)] I sure don’t remember…
Civil War and Reconstruction
April 13th, 2011 at 8:56 pm by Dr. Drang
If recent stories about the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War have piqued your interest, I highly recommend this series of lectures by Professor David Blight of Yale University. That’s a link to the Yale site, but you can also get it directly from iTunes U. Here’s the course description: This course…
Fraction arithmetic practice sheet
January 6th, 2011 at 10:03 pm by Dr. Drang
The next logical step after yesterday’s worksheet for reducing fractions is one for adding and subtracting fractions. The rules for using it are the same as my other math practice sheets: A new set of problems is generated every time you open or Refresh/Reload the page. You can use the version online or save a…
Fraction practice sheet
January 5th, 2011 at 10:57 pm by Dr. Drang
I had a long drive today, and I passed the time by thinking about making a new set of math practice sheets for my ten-year-old son. This year has been fraction-heavy, so I thought I’d start with a simple one: a page with a bunch of proper fractions that may or may not need to…
Capo 2
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:48 pm by Dr. Drang
Capo 2 from SuperMegaUltraGroovy just came out, and it’s a huge leap forward from Version 1. The basic functions for learning a piece of recorded music are still there. You can: Slow down the piece without changing the pitch. Speed up the piece without changing the pitch. Transpose the piece into a different key. Set…
Clock practice for kids update
July 19th, 2010 at 11:00 am by Dr. Drang
For reasons I can’t explain, my original post on printing time/clock practice sheets for kids always forced you to download a zipped archive of files to your local computer, unzip them in some convenient place, and launch them from your hard drive. While this is no burden to my geekier readers (who might prefer a…
Podcast cannibalism
June 21st, 2010 at 7:06 am by Dr. Drang
Well here’s an unfortunate bit of convergence. The Science Show, a radio show about—you guessed it—science from ABC Radio National in Australia, has decided to rebroadcast episodes of Radiolab, a radio show about science from WNYC in New York. This is great for Science Show fans from the antipodes who listen over the air, because…
