News

Interview With Texas Instruments President Melendy Lovett About Hollywood STEM Initiative

Texas Instruments launched their Hollywood STEM initiative with a TI-Nspire Zombie activity Yesterday, Texas Instruments revealed that it has been hard at work creating a series of supplementary curriculum STEM activities connected to movies. STEM Behind Hollywood is TI’s new program of TI-Nspire activities. The first of these activities is Zombie Apocalypse, an activity inspired by zombie movies. The activity works on the TI-Nspire handheld, iPad app, or computer software. In addition to an interactive file that allows students to learn mathematics and science using the TI-Nspire, Texas Instruments has also bundled printable pdf files that include a student handout and teacher lesson plan.

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Back to School Gadget Guide 2013

  Every year there are some great back to school gadget deals, but in 2013, the gadget makers seems to really be going all out. Rather than flood you with crazy number of deals and new products out there, I’m going to focus in on just a few. These are the gadgets and deals that I rank as the top for back to school for the 2013-14 school year.

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Chromecast for Teachers

UPDATE: My Chromecast Review for Teachers has now been posted.   Even in the midst of getting ready for the big book release today, something caught my eye yesterday that I couldn’t pass up doing a post about. If you missed it, the Google Chromecast was announced yesterday. The Chromecast is a device that should have existed a couple of years ago. It did, in fact. It was called the Apple TV, a device that let’s you beam content from your iPad, iPod, iPhone, or Mac to your television.

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Infographic: Does Teacher Pay Affect Student Peformance?

Saw this infographic on the relationship between teacher pay and student performance in the classroom, and I had to post it. You will want to share this one with your friends. Does teacher pay correlate with better student performance? In a word–yes! Source

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Google Apps for Education Infographic

If there was any question about how dominant Google Apps is becoming for in educational circles, let this infographic dispel those doubts. Among some of the highlights you’ll see below, the number of students at schools running Google Apps doubled from the fall of 2010 to 2012 all the way up to 20 millions students. And lest you think these are second tier schools, 7 of the 8 Ivy League schools are using Google Apps.

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TI Offers Free Navigator Systems

Just like last year, Texas Instruments is once again offering free TI-Nspire CX Navigator systems to teachers who collect enough proofs of purchase from TI-Nspire CX’s. This year, they are requiring 60 of the purchase cards that come with the TI-Nspire CX. The deadline for submission is September 20, 2013. You’ll need to go through a bit of online training if you’ve never attend a T3 event in the past, but the required 3 hour investment is well worth the return.

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HP Product Manager Talks Prime

Over the weekend, I submitted a series of interview question to HP about their new multi-touch calculator, the HP Prime. Today, I received a reply from Jason Smith, Product Manager, HP Calculators and Education Solutions. Below, I have shared the entirety of that response. There are several interesting nuggets in Smith’s response, including the exciting news that HP will provide Prime emulator software free to educators. If it appears that I failed to raise some obvious questions, I must point out that Smith politely sidestepped a fair number of my questions, perhaps because not all of the decisions about the Prime have been finalized yet.

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New HP Prime Will Blaze Trails

Update: “If you are looking for the latest on the HP Prime, don’t miss my HP Prime review. With Texas Instruments and Casio making virtually all of the calculator news since I started Tech Powered Math in the summer of 2010, it’s sometimes been easy to forget that there is still a third major graphing calculator manufacturer, Hewlett Packard. Rumors started circulating a couple of weeks ago on the other side of the pond that HP has been quietly getting ready to play an ace they had up their sleeve.

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TI iPad App Update and NCTM Press Release

It appears that the crew in Dallas is having a busy week. Yesterday, Texas Instruments issued their first update of their new iPad app. The update purports to fix one of the specific problems I experienced during my initial TI-Nspire iPad app review, which was a crash during the use of the camera feature. I have tried to recreate that crash since updating the app, and I haven’t been able to, so it looks like they were successful in fixing the problem.

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T3 Stream of Consciousness

In honor of one of my favorite sports bloggers, Robert of alioneye.com, I’m doing a “stream of conciousness” post to wrap up my thoughts on last weekend’s T3 conference. There’s no method or plan to this. I’ve just had a lot of random thoughts about my time in Philadelphia, none of which would make a satisfying post in and of itself. Here goes nothing. –As tough as Philadelphia sports fans can be, I was expecting the locals in Philly to be a little rough around the edges.

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