News

Educational Implications of Google Acquiring Motorola

Google grabbed headlines yesterday with the announcement that they would be paying a whopping $12.5 billion for Motorola. Here’s the story from the Associated Press. This acquisition will potentially have a big impact on educators down the road as tablets continue to make inroads in schools. It sets the stage for Google and Apple to move into an all out brawl between Android and iOS as they struggle for control of the mobile space of phones and tablets.

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Teacher Discounts for TI-Nspire CX

For the next two weeks, Texas Instruments is giving teachers a $50 discount on the TI-Nspire CX. You’ve only got until the end of August to take advantage, so be sure to get your coupon fast. And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out my TI-Nspire CX review.   From the Texas Instruments email announcing the deal: Save $50 when you make a TI-Nspire™ CX purchase Hurry – offer ends August 31st!

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Born Bad at Math? Beyond the Media Hype

The Huffington Post is just one of numerous media outlets reporting on a Johns Hopkins research study about number sense in pre-schoolers. Essentially, the study showed that even though the kids hadn’t learned much in the way of in the way of formal mathematics, it was possible to measure their number sense abilities already. Further, those with better number sense also scored highly on tests that would predict the kids’ future mathematics ability.

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Wolfram Mathematica Virtual Conference 2011

Wolfram, maker of Mathematica and the popular Wolfram Alpha app, has announced a free virtual conference on Mathematica. The conference is designed for a variety of types of Mathematica users. In fact there are five tracks for the conference. Track 1–Discover Mathematica Track 2–What’s New in Mathematica Track 3–Applying Mathematica in Industry and Research Track 4–Applying Mathematica in Education Track 5–Developing on the Mathematica Platform This is a free conference, but seats are limited.

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Sesame Street Gets Math Focus for Season 42

Wipe that shocked look off your face, Big Bird. It turns out that Sesame Street, the children’s show probably best known for encouraging reading skills is getting a increased focus on mathematics and science for the upcoming season. According to an article on the Examiner.com, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, the Count (of course), and the rest of the gang will be embracing the STEM curriculum (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in season 42.

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Canon Xmark 1 Calculator Mouse Finally to Get Release?

Buy the Canon X Mark 1 Calculator Mouse on Canon.com.Canon Xmark 1 Calculator Mouse It’s been a whole year since I originally wrote about the Cannon X Mark 1 Calculator Mouse back in the summer of 2010, the perfect marriage of a calculator and mouse. Well, we waited for the originally announced release in November 2010 which never came. I assumed that Canon had discontinued the project altogether. And all of a sudden, the X Mark 1 Calculator Mouse is back in the news.

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Gossamer Web Browser for TI-83, TI-84

I never cease to be amazed by the ingenuity of the Texas Instruments hacker/programmer community. TechCrunch is reporting the release of a web browser for the TI-83/TI-84 family of graphing calculators. This is far from an official Texas Instruments release. Chris Mitchell, “KermMartian,” a Ph.D. student at NYU, has named his creation Gossamer. This a text based browser on the order of Lynx, if any of you can remember that far back.

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Wolfram Launches Computational Document Format, CDF Files

Wolfram is on fire. While the company behind Mathematica has been a presence in high level mathematical circles for over a decade, Wolfram’s flurry of activity over the last year or so has been truly amazing. First came a mobile version of Wolfram Alpha, their popular web application, followed shortly by the Wolfram course assistant apps. Now comes the release of a new document format, the Computational Document Format or CDF.

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NPR Fibonacci Podcast

NPR put up a nice podcast on Weekend Edition this past Saturday about Leonardo da Pisa’s (aka Fibonacci) “Book of Calculation.” Most of us are familiar with Fibonacci’s famous sequence of numbers that became known as the Fibonacci numbers, where any number in the sequence after the first two is found by adding the previous two: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, … I have to admit, I wasn’t aware until I heard this podcast what an impact Fibonacci had on the ability of regular people to do arithmetic.

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Update on the HP Touchpad Calculator in webOS 3.0.2

Just recently had up an article that the HP TouchPad was released without a calculator. Now PreCentral is reporting that TouchPad owners have nothing to worry about. The release of webOS 3.0.2 is on the way. By the end of July, the TouchPad will have apps for Amazon MP3, the Kindle, and, yep, a new native calculator app is on the way.

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