Well, let’s get this part out of the way first. The folks over at the Cube-Zone (G4 Cube Forever!) will tell you the Cube didn’t fail, still has life in it, won x-many awards, and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, we can all agree that the Cube’s sales have been, shall we say, less […]
Category Archives: Mac Lab Report
I teach Astronomy and Space Science. Wishing to teach students about the difficulties of manned vs. robotic exploration, it occurred to me that it would be nice if I could simulate a deep-space rover. The basic idea is simple: Use a radio controlled car to drive around a video camera, which will transmit live video […]
2001 – Are you a news junkie? I used to watch news on TV until my wife and I had twins. Now I get to watch Teletubbies and Disney’s Dinosaur five times a day!
2001 – When the word gets out that you want old Macs, people respond. A reader of this column recently donated several Macs to our school, including an old (1993) PowerBook 145b. Since my PowerBook 5300cs was stolen from a storeroom last fall, I have been ‘Bookless, and all computing has been restricted to home […]
2001 – It has always been my tradition to run one OS behind the current version. Many people do this – and with good reasons. If you depend on your machine, you don’t want to trash a hard drive with a buggy install.
This week’s column takes the intermediate user to that step where they finally dive in and register a domain name.
Today we take a look at the ability to create, use and share custom graphics libraries in AppleWorks. As usual, we are concentrating here on AppleWorks 5 and ClarisWorks 4, but many of the comments should apply to other versions.
2001 – I recently purchased an OrangeLink FireWire 1394 + USB PCI combo card so I could begin to add some of those nifty new peripherals I’ve been reading about. I own a 300 MHz Beige Power Mac G3 desktop at home and had my eye on some USB peripherals for a while now.
In my school and district, we are beset with the many problems associated with an aging fleet of Power Mac 5200s. The 5200, an all-in-one design, contains design flaws described elsewhere on Low End Mac. Suffice to say they are slow, crash a lot, and don’t do anything particularly well (although they are okay at […]
Rather than just buy a USB scroll wheel mouse, the author decides to give the Wacom Graphire USB graphics tablet a try.
Occasionally a teacher discovers that they ask the same students to answer questions over and over because some students are more enthusiastic, while others are content to melt into the background. In order to bring more students into the discussion, I ask students at random – selected by a dice roll or by computer – […]
This short appendix is not a tutorial on how to make presentations on the computer, but rather how to get one started in AppleWorks 5. AppleWorks 5 has the ability to take almost any document and turn it into a full-screen, menu-less display, but the functions are hidden. There are also some built-in presentation templates […]
2001 – This week’s Mac Lab Report focuses on how you connect your computer to a large enough monitor so that students can see your display for presentations, demos, and so on.
My first digital camera was a black and white QuickCam eyeball. The QuickCam was originally made by Connectix, but eventually the product was sold to Logitech. It has mostly survived the transition unscathed, and some models are still USB Mac compatible. However, the old style serial Mac version is no longer manufactured.
This is the second in a series of articles I am writing in support of some staff development meetings I am conducting in the Spring of 2001 for the Antioch Unified School District in California.
This how-to article accompanies an article explaining how to use sensor probeware to generate graphs and data for school lab reports. It describes how to control the graphs (which are really PICT files) and the data (which is tab-delimited number data) when you paste it into AppleWorks.
This is the first of a series of support articles I am writing for some district professional development meetings I am conducting in the Spring of 2001. I’m posting them as Mac Lab Reports because I believe others can benefit from what I have learned.
2000 – Today’s topic is essentially the beginning of the answer to the question: “Now that I have the Internet in my room, what do I do with it?”
2000 – In one of my Mac Lab Report columns, I discussed the usual arguments that fly between passionate users regarding the superiority of the Mac vs. the PC platform. However, a dispassionate outside observer might listen to such an argument and rightfully ask, “What difference does it make? Just get on with your work,” […]
This is the last installment of the story I’ve been telling about how my classroom science lab went from no computers to a Power Mac computer lab in just three years.
2000 – As you spend time repairing machines, mostly by swapping parts, inevitably you wind up with a hulk with nothing in it that works – it’s just a place to hold parts. Bad motherboard. Gummed up floppy. CD won’t eject. Questionable power supply. Things like that.
Continuing the saga begun in last week’s column, at the end of my first year at my new school I had installed a small network of aging 680×0 machines in my room.
2001 – Let’s listen in on your standard Mac vs. PC flame war….
2001 – When you are finally able to obtain a computer, it may be that you are offered a chance to help make the purchasing decision; you may be forced to accept a computer you don’t really want – or you might be faced with accepting donations of PCs or Macs, because that’s all you […]
The reason this column is called Mac Lab Report is that these articles will chronicle the steps I took to go from a classroom with one computer to a classroom with 10 fully networked Power Macs in less than three years – at virtually no expense to our science department budget.
2000 – When I am converting Windows users or introducing new users to the computer for the first time, there are a number of conceptual hurdles that it takes repeated instruction to get across. These include problems with getting a disk out of the computer, distinguishing between the Finder and the dialogs in Open and […]
