General usage flash grapher

The need arose to be able to quickly graph points and lines during class presentations so I decided to develop the following flash application. The curve is a great addition but I don't know that it will be as useful. It's pretty simple to use just select the point, line, or curved button. Next put them on the graph. If you mess up just hit the red X and it all goes away. Below is a screen shot of the program. Just give it a click to head on over to my other website where you can give it a try. Feel free to come back and leave me some comments on how useful you thing this is.

Learning Math & Science Applets

Check out this great website that can help your students understand different math and science topics. The site is not free but they do have a 30 trial and you can try out the applets for 5 mintues before they are disabled.
I introduced it to my students today I'll provide some updates here on whether they find it useful or not.

explorelearning.com

Real world application

It appears that the people at NASA have done a great job at making interactive learning pages for a variety of topics. Check them out at spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/
Some of the topics include weather, lasers, CCD's (camera's), robitics, coordinate systems, and more.

Great Chemistry Sites

While searching the Internet yesterday I realized the abundance of interesting interactive periodic chart websites. Here are a couple of them that I thought looked pretty useful and well designed.

• Chemicool.com
• Quizlet.com Periodical Set.
  This site will help you memorize the elements names and symbols in the periodic table. You can also create your own quiz sets.
  
• Wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_element
• dmoz.org/Science/Chemistry/Periodic_Table/
  Llinks to sites with useful period table information

I'm sure that there are many more great sites out there theres are just a couple that caught my interest. Make sure and look at Quizlet.com it appears to be a great teaching to for other classes as well.

New School Bells Program

My school has been using an old version of windows that used a NI input/output board. The computer finally crashed and I wasn't able to get the driver updated so I decided to develop new software that did not depend on the NI board. Having done some research on this before I decided to develop a solution that would use the parallel port because it would be easy to program. The design needed to be such that it could be easily ported to a standard serial port or USB port. Talking with the registrar at school we agreed on the following list of features as important.

• Easy to use
• Dependable
• Manual over ride
• Synchronize time with an Atomic clock or Internet
• Select which days to ring on, no weekends, etc....
• Save predefined schedules

Putting the pieces together

• Linux is the new OS of choice for dependability and the ability to remotely access the system. Also the program will try to access a database to get the times for the bell that day. If it fails it will try to access a file on the local computer. Access can be given to these files through file sharing should the database fail. Also Linux can be run on most any old computer.
  
• The decision was made to integrate the UI with the schools web based attendance system. This would take care of access for multiple users and security. This would also take care of the ease of use because the registrar is already used to the system.
• The registrar or whoever is given permission to change the bells can create and update schedules and then assign the schedules via a monthly calendar to any day of the year.
  
• The hardware for the moment is a parallel port connected to a relay. There is a manual button that can ring the bells and an override to keep the computer from ringing the bells. This is handy because the bells ring while the computer is booting. A future solution will be a device that works via the serial or USB port. I have a friend that has developed a independent bells system that can be programmed via the serial or USB port which we hope to integrate into our system because it will make it that much dependable since it could continue to run independent of the computer.

This program is still under development and is being used by my school. If you are interested in this program post a comment and I'll try and post a copy of the program when it becomes available.