Jonesieblog

This morning I have been working on Geogebra. It is a fantastic dynamic geometry/algebra package and has two killer features:

1. It is Open Source, free and cross-platform, so all students and teachers can install it at home
2. It has one-click publish to Web, so it is really easy to make dynamic resources available on-line

I produced this screencast, showing how to use sliders to control objects in a worksheet:

More importantly, though, I discovered Geogebra at JotSpot which has an awesome collection of screencasts, tutorials and pdf cheatsheets. Check it out!

Stumble it!

Apologies to those of my readers who are not web developers – what follows may well make no sense to you whatsoever!

I am so please with myself! For nigh on a year now, I have been aware of a potential problem with FreeMIS (the Ruby-on-Rails based  management information system for schools that I have developed) and today I solved that problem.

The problem is that the printing of a full set of reports for all the pupils in a year group is a huge task, which can take Rails anything up to 130 seconds to complete. By the time it has done this, the browser and or web server have got bored and given up waiting. I have played around with the configuration of Apache and FastCGI, and tried using mongrel instead, but none managed to fix the problem 100%.

In PHP, it would be easily solved by purging the data produced out to the browser repeatedly through the task, but Rails does not have this option.

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I realised that I could solve the problem by doing the reports one pupil at a time!

Obvious, you might think, but the system needs a “one-click” solution for printing all the reports for a register class – it would not be acceptable to require user input to print out each individual pupil’s reports.

What I realised last night was that if I did the printing of reports via Ajax and RJS, then I get exactly what I wanted.

I start by submitting a form via Ajax to print the reports for a register class.

The action renders the reports for the first pupil in the register class at the bottom of the relevant div, then puts a hidden variable into the form, with the id of the next pupil in the register class. It then tells the browser to “click” on the submit button of the form. All the reports for the register class then come out, pupil by pupil, and no individual browser<->server cycle lasts more than a couple of seconds, so no chance of timing out. I can even put a percentage progress bar at the top of the page. Happy happy joy joy

Stumble it!

My first Geogebra screencast seems to have gone down quite well, so here’s another. This time, I’m demonstrating Geogebra’s graphing capabilities

Stumble it!

As I have visited schools across East Lothian this year, I have shown several maths teachers the Geogebra dynamic geometry package. They have all been impressed, but asked for more support in learning how to use it. This morning, I’ve put together a quick screencast to show the basics of using this excellent Open Source program. This first screencast looks at the geometric constructions that you can create. My next screencast will look at graphs and functions.

Stumble it!

I was most surprised today to discover that the top search phrase leading people to this blog over the last few weeks has been “the catburgers.” This is the name of the indie band I was in back in the late ’80s (I sang and played guitar).

I can’t imagine who might be looking for my old band, unless it is some kids in North Berwick who heard about the band through my son.

Whoever it might be, I’ll take advantage of this opportunity to post up some mp3s from the good old days, both recorded in 1987.  I just realised that’s 20 years ago!  Time for a reunion tour of the states… anyway here are “Children’s TV” and “First Day of Spring” for your entertainment:

After all, you have to keep your visitors happy don’t you?

Stumble it!