| Even
with the cold wet weather outside, class began on a cheery note
as we all admired Tony’s shirt that he says he wore for
Hawaiian Day at school. Spirits were high as we learned we would
be some of the first to view the world premiere of Angles
made by a computer programmer, Brian Schau, of Denmark. He developed
this program after seeing it on Tony’s wish
list. In this game, an angle is shown and the object is to
guess the measure of the angle. The difference between your guess
and the actual measure is added to your running score. We could
tell Tony was already addicted to this game and was determinedly
trying to make a perfect guess which Melissa T. managed to do
this evening- way to go!
We moved on
from one exciting moment to another with Easter eggs. Even though
we were approaching Easter weekend, our lesson was on a different
type of Easter eggs- the hidden features made by computer programmers.
Make sure to check out Tony’s
blog for more details! You can also do a Google
search for more of these Easter eggs. Tony’s question
for us – what would we put as our Easter egg if we were
a programmer?
Next, we moved
onto Quizzler,
which is an application that allows you to design quizzes for
the handheld. It is a free application, and you can upgrade it
for only $10.00 in order to have more options. We were able to
view a couple of sample Quizzlers and test our knowledge in art
and government. A neat example was demonstrated using two handhelds
with an Intelligence Quiz on one and a tic-tac-toe
board on the other.
Becky and Rick were the brave volunteers to take on this challenge
in an attempt to win one of Tony’s famous stylus pens. The
race was close as they attempted to answer the difficult questions
about our teacher. In the end, it was Rick who got three in a
row and one of Tony’s stylus pens. Good job Rick!
Now it was
time for us to learn how to make our own quiz using Quizzler We
received an instructional handout,
and Tony informed us that we must follow all of the directions
exactly, or the entire program would not work. If we choose to
do this assignment, we will need to give Tony a printout of our
quiz questions from Memo Pad.
After dinner,
we were off to the computer lab where Tony guided us through the
process of downloading applications. One of the suggestions he
made was to only add five new applications at a time. It is important
to make sure they run properly and do not cause our handheld to
crash before we add any more. We also reviewed the three ways
of acquiring new applications- shareware, freeware, and commercial.
Freeware is free, and Shareware gives users the opportunity to
try an application before they buy it.
One of the
suggested sites to find Freeware is freewarepalm.com.
Tonight we also got a special gift from Tony. We each received
a Palm Educational Solutions CD-ROM that contains several demos
of applications. Thanks Tony!
The time just
flew by and before we knew it, it was the end of class. As we
returned to the classroom, Tony beamed us our new game of the
night- SameGame.
Our end of the class reminders were the two assignments we can
be working on- one is designing a quiz using Quizzler and print
out the quiz questions to bring to class on March 31st. The other
assignment we may choose to do is the download an application
assignment. Remember to choose an application that is not on the
list Tony beamed to us during class tonight. This second assignment
is not due until April 7th.
For the next
two classes we will welcome two visiting educators working on
their Tech Flex requirement for Millard. Welcome!
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