2002 – My students sometimes joke with me that if they don’t say they like Macs, I’ll ruin their grades. Of course, I wouldn’t ever make my computing preference a factor in a grade; other than the fact students must complete assignments on a computer, I’m not so narrow-minded (or unethical) as to do such […]
Category Archives: Mac Lab Report
2002 – The communication gap between teachers and software companies is hindering the adoption of technology by “technology resisters” and the adoption of standards by veterans waiting for the latest fad to expire. Apple knows a little about this, probably more than any other computer vendor, but even they don’t get it in a fundamental […]
2002 – Could it be that Apple is undergoing a radical mutation and growing a new backbone?
Macworld San Francisco 2002 has come and gone, and the new flat-panel iMac has finally arrived. The iWalk was shown to be a Photoshop daydream, and the 1.0+ GHz Power Macs predicted by the rumor sites are still in the future.
2002 – On the face of it, Apple’s digital hub strategy seems to be progressing well. At Macworld San Francisco 2002, I saw how iPhoto nicely complements iMovie’s intuitive design. I got to touch an iPod for the first time – boy, it sure is tiny – and as I reported yesterday, I got to […]
2002 – I’m sitting in one of the lobbies at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, having made a pass through the entire exhibit hall, up and down every aisle. This is my first Macworld, and I’ve learned a few things, seen some things, and talked to a bunch of people.
2002 – One of the difficulties of working in a lab full of Macs is that students sometimes wander off and do things they’re not supposed to do. Our district has filtering software, but as several news reports have recently pointed out, no filtering software is perfect. Teachers simply have to be aware of what […]
2001 – This is the first Mac Lab Report I’ve submitted for a while, primarily because I was working on a grant proposal for my school, and it absorbed all of my time. It absorbed my time not just because it was a lengthy proposal (approximately 20 pages of text and charts) but because it […]
2001 – Back in January, I wrote in Never Go with Point Oh that I was conservatively waiting to switch to Mac OS 9 until Apple brought out OS 9.1 or greater, because by then most of the bugs would be eliminated. I also tend to run about one OS version behind the rest of […]
Our school is one of many that purchased some of Apple’s “iBook mobility solutions” this summer, but unlike some well-meaning souls in various spots around the country, we decided not to just roll the computers into classrooms right away. We’re going to field test the technology before it is placed in classrooms (gasp!).
2001 – This is the fourth in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on its use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – Back in the old days (that would be the 1980s), when you had a computer in the classroom, you used it for grades. We also used to put ditto masters (sort of like carbon paper with more residue, used for making at most around a couple hundred copies of something) through the dot […]
2001 – Over the past two years, I have collected a number of pre-PowerPC Macs, mostly through donations to our school by individuals and corporations.
As I sit here at the end of a long teaching day, contemplating the work I have to do over the next few days, I recall when I was teaching in the mid-1980s using Apple II era equipment.
Mimio is a whiteboard capture tool that allows a USB-equipped Mac to capture the user’s marks on a standard whiteboard and save or print the results as a handwritten document. I recently got to play with one purchased for our school.
2001 – I find that casual users of the Mac OS do not investigate the features of the operating system as thoroughly as necessary to achieve the greatest efficiency. Perhaps that is because Mac users tend not to read the manuals for their computers (if there is a manual to read), or maybe it is […]
2001 – There have been many excellent reviews of the new snow-white dual-USB iBook detailing such interesting features as the dropdown hinge, the integrated FireWire port, the keys that pop off too easily, the beautiful scratchable surface, the nice software included (such as iMovie2), and the bright high-resolution screen. This is not one of those […]
2001 – This is the third in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – Iomega has produced a new entry in its collection of Zip drives. There are now, what, seven or eight different Zip drives, from the VL-Series reviewed here to the Zip 250 FireWire drive – and that’s not counting drives made for internal installation.
2001 – This is the second in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on its use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – This is the first in a series of reviews of planetarium software for the Macintosh, with emphasis on its use in schools. Planetarium software, at a minimum, simulates the appearance of the night sky given certain parameters such as the date, time, and observer location.
2001 – If you have ever set up a small Mac network, you know creating a server is as easy as pie (see Transferring Files from Your Old Mac to Your New One: Classic Mac OS Edition for more on this topic), and it’s a snap to setup login names and passwords using Users and […]
As regular readers of this column are aware, I am an astronomy teacher. I teach both high-school and college astronomy for teachers (online) and am involved in several organizations and astronomy programs. I maintain a collection of links at www.AstronomyTeacher.com, which lists dozens of links sorted by category.
2001 – Transferring files from one computer to another used to be relatively simple; you just copied the files to a floppy and sneaker-netted it over to the other machine, and voilà, you’re done. However, since the advent of the iMac, which has no floppy drive, users have had to become more creative. The solutions […]
This article explains how to take the skills you have as a Windows user and get the same job done on a Macintosh. It is intended as a guide for beginning users and not a comprehensive Mac vs. Windows comparison; for example, the niceties of configuring TCP/IP are not covered here.
For math and science teachers, entering equations into typewritten (or word processed) documents is often a challenge. For the novice, many tabs, spaces, underlines, and struggles with the Symbol font yield unsatisfactory results.
July 2001 – This week, Apple will undoubtedly make several announcements at the Macworld Expo in New York. Among these will be some product revision announcements, Mac vs. PC benchmarking demonstrations, and sales figures showing how Apple has regained the lead position in educational sales. What won’t be announced are some of the unfortunate tactics […]
2001 – If you had to do a presentation to the city council regarding radioactive emissions from your local nuclear plant, first you’d do a bunch of research and then sit down to create your presentation. Although your material may be important and your research thorough, you may not be able to get your point […]
If I could eliminate Windows from the face of the earth, I wouldn’t do it.
2001: My first Mac wasn’t my own. It belonged to my college professor. I think it was a 512K Fat Mac, because it booted off of a floppy and didn’t have a hard drive. It couldn’t have been later than 1985, because that’s when I graduated.
