Teaching with Technology
Ideas and Tips to Use in the Classroom and beyond

Volume 1, Issue 2
August/September 2004

FREE BOOKS ONLINE

One of the required textbooks in many Education Psychology classes is entitled: How People Learn. A quick navigation over to amazon.com to price and order the book will reveal a price of $24.95, no discount, and .05 short of free shipping. A quick navigation to National Academies Press would provide the same text for free.

“The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States.

The navigation bar on the left demonstrates the vast range of topics their publications fall under. Over 3,000 of the texts within these categories are offered online for free. The catch is that you must read them online. If you prefer your own printed copy, you can purchase and download many of the texts for substantially reduced prices and without the concern of shipping. Some of the titles you will find include: Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Committee on Recognizing, Evaluating, Rewarding, and Developing Excellence in Teaching of Undergraduate Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology, Marye Anne Fox and Norman Hackerman, Editors, National Research Council Helping Children Learn Mathematics Jeremy Kilpatrick and Jane Swafford, Editors, Mathematics Learning Study Committee, National Research Council The Silent Landscape: The Scientific Voyage of HMS Challenger by: Richard Corfield Mountains of Madness: A Scientist's Odyssey in Antarctica by: John Long Critical Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Differences in Health in Late Life: Norman B. Anderson, Randy A. Bulatao, and Barney Cohen, Editors,

While the NAP is a wonderful resource, it is not the only resource for free books on the web. Another is Project Gutenberg, which provides more than 13,000 texts all of which can be freely downloaded and redistributed for non-commercial use.
http://www.gutenberg.org. Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of such texts on the web. Here are some of the titles you’ll find there: Hand Shadows to Be Thrown upon the Wall by Henry Bursill , The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci — Complete by Leonardo da Vinci , The Art of War, Ulysses by James Joyce, How to Speak and Write Correctly by Joseph Devlin , Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 by Havelock Ellis, Grimm's Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, and more…

And if you like the convenience of ebooks, and don’t mind paying for them, you can find plenty more at www.amazon.com, www.fictionwise.com and many others. Have fun!

AN OPEN SOURCE OFFICE THAT RIVALS MICROSOFT'S

Impressed? Well, OpenOffice doesn't stop there in its pantry of file formats. In addition to Writer, OpenOffice offers a presentation program like PowerPoint called Impress (and it does!) which allows you to import PowerPoint presentations, save as PowerPoint presentations, or export a presentation in shockwave format--yes, that's right--a Flash file! It's graphics program, called Draw, also includes Flash as one of its file formats.

For those of you who are more impressed with databases and numbers, OpenOffice offers "Calc" for spreadsheets, and Database User Tools that, among other features, support for MySQL databases.

OpenOffice will run on Microsoft Windows 98, NT, ME, 2000 and XP1, Mac OS X 10.2.x or Darwin PPC platforms,Linux kernel 2.2.13 or higher, glibc2 2.1.3 or higher and Solaris 8. For more information, or to download your copy, go to: http://www.openoffice.org

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CITING SOURCES

Writing a bibliography can be a challenging task. With the numerous choices of media available today, knowing the proper formats for each style (whether MLA or APA) can take more than just a good memory or a "how-to" for citing sources. Thankfully, citations machines were created to help. They are free and available anywhere you can access the internet.

How they Work

When you first access a citation machine, you will have a list of media to select from: book, online journal, etc. After selecting the proper media type, you will see a small form asking for information: author's name, pub. date, etc--whatever information is needed for APA and MLA citations. When you've completed filling in the information, you will submit it and a moment later the proper APA and MLA version will appear ready for you to copy and paste into your document--proper punctuation and all.

For individuals who prefer doing it themselves, but need a quick reference, most citation machines offer instructional pages--much like you find in reference materials on citing sources. It is always a good idea to check who has created the machine, and who is supplying the information. It is also a good idea to verify some of the citations to make sure the machine is working properly. You can also check with librarians for the citation machines they recommend.

The citation machine I recommend is:
Landmarks Citation Machine