bodmas blog

Use VBA for smooth dynamically updating scroll bars

Last minute favorites for the non-calculator Module 5 paper

Cheaper digital speech recorders can’t produce CD quality but may have plenty of uses in the classroom – just put an external mic on!

Moodle at Shefcol according to Julia DugglebyBlogging by meSeb Schmoller’s fortnightly mailing is now published by typepad. Seb is inviting guest contributions, and I was honoured to be asked to contribute. I wrote about using blogger as a way of getting colleagues interested in online support. My contribution meshed in with Julia’s about the next [...]

“Some lecture classes have 250 students, so I question the effectiveness of a didactic lecture for an hour.”
Dr Bill Ashraf will be distributing lectures by podcast soon in place of live lectures in a theatre. In groups of 250 plus I can see his point: no one ever asks a question in a group of [...]

When is a crime rate valid?

Why do some students find this problem so hard?

Imagine living in a flat that was 100 square feet in size. Communal toilets and showers I suppose, but what about the cooking? They seem to have flasks but no stoves so perhaps there is a communal kitchen. No sign of ‘a room of one’s own’ here.

Michael Wolf is showing us part of the living [...]

Not tabloid hacks with fast habits but a book about how to use Macromedia Flash to make Web based news stories. One included exercise is about synchronising sound with image transitions: flash lessons here we come…

We were looking at finding a value for the intercept of a straight line graph when the scale of the graph made it difficult to have an X axis that started at zero – we were setting up and solving a simple equation within a context.

This second whiteboard processed using ScanR was taken in [...]

The photo above shows one of today’s whiteboards as imaged using my Olympus Camedia point and shoot – the images are 1600 by 1200 pixels. I resized the image above using Photoshop Elements with bi-cubic resampling. No other adjustments have been made, the flat image is typical of this camera. A quick e-mail to ScanR.com [...]

Scanr is a Web service that claims to “convert photos of whiteboards and documents into searchable PDF files”. The ‘searchable’ bit applies to pictures of documents with typed text (see later). The service certainly makes converting fuzzy badly lit images of (ordinary) whiteboards more readable. The ‘whiteboard’ function can also be used to convert [...]

There is an interesting discussion about one page Web sites on the Signals vs Noise blog published by the Web programming company 37 Signals. I especially chimed with the comment by Geoff Harris

“I agree with Wilson’s comments about distilling information down to the most basic requirements and leaving as is.

Doing so is a fantastic exercise [...]

Moodle 1.53 and 1.6 can be ‘installed’ on a USB stick. Just make sure the drive letter assigned to the stick stays the same on each machine

Yotophoto is a search engine for copyright free or free use images

More photos of the street

Black rust form mould grows in concentric circles

Current reading: Biography of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana places the performer in a social and historical context.

Anyone got recommendations for simple digital sound recorders?

Some snaps on a visit with sunshine