Next gear!

I think I need a bluetooth pen-tablet (almost certainly the Wacom Graphire Bluetooth), so that I can use hand-writing recognition with my smartboard.

That starts bringing the price of my classroom up somewhat: the Graphire is $250 retail, as little as $210 in real life (from Amazon-- eBay doesn't have any cheap ones)... Then again, I've done pretty well for myself. Here's the tech-gear I have and use in my room (notably, all of this is owned by me, not my school, because you gotta own your own tools, right?)

Item, BestRetail$, Approx$ I got it for.
XGA LCD projector, $530, $250
Document Camera w/ projector, $850, $250
Wireless projector adapter, $250, $120
Smartboard w/ IR pen, $1100, $50
20'x3' whiteboard, $800, $80

Projected purchases:
Bluetooth tablet, $250, $210
Bluetooth keyboard, $20, $20


So, well under $1,000 for two projectors (one is a document camera, and has bad color; the other is set up as a smartboard that connects to my computer...)

Coolest toy evar

I just got my Wiimote Whiteboard working on my Mac. I bought two IR pens from some guy who's making them just for this purpose.

Johnny Chung Lee, you are my hero. Uwe Schmidt, you too. This is pretty amazing technology, and rediculously cheap ($10 per pen. $40 for a Wiimote. Fifteen minutes to set up, including download time, reading the docs, etc). Seriously world-changing badassery.

I've now downloaded several new applications to use in the classroom, including GeoGebra (which is sort of an easier-to-use, freeware alternative to Geometer's Sketchpad) and of course Gimp, which I previously hadn't used since moving to a Mac (when I first migrated, it was only available as a somewhat clunky X11 port. Now, it's much cleaner, and since I now have a reason to routinely want a paint program, it was high time I grabbed it).

Weirdly, I'm still using AppleWorks to draw a lot of precision figures-- it's bought and paid for, and it runs well under X.5/Rosetta. So, until I find a good figure-drawing program (easy to use, supports grid-on or grid-off, makes simple line-drawings and circles, embeds text and rotates by any user-specified number of degrees), I'll keep using it...

So, the future starts tomorrow. I can hardly wait to get my wireless adapter for my LCD projector. Once that's in, I'll pick up a bluetooth keyboard to keep near the whiteboard, and start making this a routine part of my teaching practice...

Also, tomorrow, I'll be doing a lot of show-and-tell with other teachers... :)