UniBoard is Now Free

In the past I've shown off this great program for working with tablets or with a Wiimote whiteboard called Uniboard. The problem was that Uniboard seemed to be dead. There had been no updates or tweets for months (maybe a year). I figured it was a piece of great software that would just fade into non-existence.

Well, yesterday I went looking for it again. I had observed a colleague of mine teaching yesterday and realized that even though it wasn't being updated that he could definitely use it. Well, apparently last week Uniboard went Open Source. It is now called Sankore and is totally free. Warning, the page is all in French. Here's a direct link to the download page.

The free version used to have a nag-screen on every page, it's gone now. The screen-capture tool had a watermark in the recording which is also now gone. I can whole heartedly recommend this program. Whether you need a tool to help present lessons in class or you want to record lessons for reverse lecture you should check out Sankore.

Molecular Biology in Your Kitchen?

I love the Internet. I stumbled across an article on BoingBoing about gel electrophoresis. One of the stumbling blocks most high school biology classes face related to this type of technique is the cost associated with it. Well, the article in question linked to a process involving straws and 9 volt batteries. No gel box and no costly power supply.

This led me to a cool Google Group, DIYBio.  There's lots of good stuff here that makes me wish I taught biology. I really do love how the Internet is fostering groups and supporting hobby communities that wouldn't have been able to exist, except in a local context, in the past.  

The OpenWetWare Wiki has the complete protocol. It is used to separate the pigments in food coloring as proof of concept.

Open Office Experiment

I've been playing around with Open Office and I've decided to give it a try full time. Open Office is a free, open source office suit. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database, mathematical equation editor, and drawing program.

In order to give Open Office a fair shot I'm going to see if I can drop Microsoft Office for a full month. I'll not use Microsoft Office at all. The only caveat I'll place on this is I won't let my experiment have a negative impact on my teaching. All my old files are in Microsoft format, so we'll see how Open Office (or Neo Office on my Mac) will handle them.

I have a couple of reasons for trying this. The first is the version of MS Office for Mac OSX does not run natively (it runs in Rosetta, an emulator) so is often slow and sluggish. Additionally, I haven't been very pleased with the transition to the Mac version of MS Office. It's not exactly the same, but is close enough to drive me crazy. So, I figure this is the perfect time to switch programs.

A second reason is it's free and if I never have to buy MS Office again I would be very happy. I've been using Google Docs (Writely) a lot lately, but find I still need to have a wordprocessor and spreadsheet on my computer.

The third reason is the size of MS Word files. I was playing around with Open Office today and saved a file in the default format. It was 13kb, when I saved the same file in MS Word format it was 71 kb!!! This is outrageous. I'm tired of lazy programmers telling me memory is cheap. I'd prefer they write more efficient programs and file formats.

At a minimum I'll stop using MS Office for the next month to give Open Office a fair shot. After that I'll review it here and hopefully I'll dicide I'm not going back.

Tags: Open Office, Open Source, education, falconphysics