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... :)