iPod Touch: Better (and more colorful) Than a TI-83?

TI calculators are so last year. Especially with the popular (and free) Graphing Calculator application being distributed in the App Store by Gabor Nagy. This app is, basically, a colorful TI calculator right on the iPod. Although it may not offer every functionality of a TI, the Graphic Calculator app allows for the most popular tasks, such as graphing up to five functions (all viewable on the same graph), tracing and plotting points, and a root finder. And to top it off, the graphs are colorful, and you can use the pinch-gesture to zoom and scroll the graph, much like when browsing the internet in Safari. You can even take a screenshot of the graph and email it to yourself. As of the most recent update, the following mathematical expressions are supported by Graphing Calculator:

Supported Expressions: log, log10, ln, exp, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, sinh, cosh, tanh, degrees to radians, radians to degrees, absolute value, square root.

There is no doubt that with innovative apps such as the Graphing Calculator being released, it won’t be long before not-so-new devices such as the TI calculators become outdated. As far as I know, we need more apps like this to give us an excuse to play with our iPods in class.

Back at it with Conference Proposals

Okay… It has been a couple of months, and it is just killing me. Almost every day I see something that I want to pass along, so I am going to end m Hiatus and write a couple of blog posts now and again.

I have been working on two conference proposals, so hopefully I can write some of what I am proposing here as a sounding board… because, really, what is a blog anyway… 🙂

Here are my two topics I am thinking of proposing:

• “iPhone/iTouch in Education – How Location Aware, Ubiquitous Computing, Multi-Touch and Accelerometer will impact computing and Education.” – This proposal will focus on first on the capabilities of iPhones/iTouch’s and then on some of the applications that are available.
• “Using Web 2.0 to Help Those with Learning Disabilities.” – This proposal is growing out of some workshops I have been doing for our learning disabilities group here on campus. I realized that this is a place where technology can really help students, but not much has been written about it.

What do you think?

Free iTouch for Students that buy Mac’s

Apple just released their 2008 promo… any students that buy a Mac will get a free iTouch… how awesome is that! 🙂

I got an iTouch a while ago and I have to say… THEY ARE AWESOME. As close to small computers as I have ever seen! I can see these becoming a LOT more prevalent… especially on campus’ with WiFi everywhere (like UNC)! Awesome!

Macword 2008 in 60 Seconds

As a follow up from my post yesterday about MacWorld and the new MacBook Pro.  Here is a 60 second video of all the important announcements made yesterday.  Good for keeping up to date about what is going on.  Enjoy.