Getting Started with 3D Printing - Find a problem to solve

This week I went high-tech to go low-tech. When I taught physics I taught with a student centered pedagogy called Modeling Physics. In Modeling we have student collect data and then use that data to construct models to explain physics. Basically students do labs, graph the data, find an equation that fits their graph and then they turn that equation into a generic equation that can be used in other situations. Everything works great if you can get the students to collect really clean data and if you can actually convince them to think.

I don't teach physics anymore, but our new physics teacher, Vance, also uses the Modeling Method. He built some apparatuses last week end to collect really good acceleration data. This is just a wood disk with a golf tee glued to the center of each side. This rolls down a pair of rails and is slow enough to allow students to get some really good data. I'd thought about building these myself in the past, but I knew it would be hard to do and that I'd probably screw it up. So I never constructed any. Vance did a fine job in his construction, but he ended up having all the problems I knew I would have had.

Enter the 3D printer. Looking at Vance's system I knew I could knock something out on the 3D printer that would work. This is one of the coolest things about owning a 3D printer. You will see problems and begin to envision solutions. Once you start doing this the easier it becomes. The only risk is that you will quickly assume the 3D printer is the best tool for all jobs. As awesome as it is, it is not always the best way to solve every problem.

I spent about 10 minutes in Tinkercad on my design and then it took about an hour and a half to print. Vance tells me it worked great for the lab. I'm already envisioning modifications for future investigations. The design could be easily modified to investigate rotational inertia and energy, but maybe I'll leave it to students to create these new designs.

Acceleration Paradigm Lab - Teacher Notes

Materials (for each group):

• 2 bricks with holes or grooved sides
• 2 five foot sections of electrical conduit
• 1 wood disk with a golf tee sticking out of the center of each side, or 1 3D printed disk with cones out of each side
• Dry erase marker
• A metronome set to 60 peats/minute (or a computer program) - One for the entire class

Basic Procedure:

• Set the conduit up as a pair of rails spaced appropriately for your rolling disk
• Let the disk roll down the rails
• Mark the position of the disk at 1 or 2 second intervals
• Create a position vs. time graph and find the equation that fits the data (should be a quadratic)
• Create a velocity vs. time data set and graph from the position data using the secant line created by each pair of points on the position graph. This graph should be linear.
• Note: If the incline is too steep it will slide rather than roll.

Class discussion:

• I always have students use the actual variables in their equations, no x's or y's. In addition all constants need units.
• Once students have equations for both their position and velocity graphs I ask them what each constant represents and how they know. This is pretty easy for the velocity graph, but a little harder for the position graph. It leads to some great conversations and ultimately to a pair of generic equations we will use for the rest of the kinematics unit.

My 3D Model:

• On Thingiverse
• On Tinkercad: the Disk, the Side Cones.

This is a part 6 of my series on 3D Printers in Education. Go back to earlier parts in the 3D printer series: Part 1, Part 5

Walking the Walk - Creating video for students with only an iPad

Next year my school will begin it's 1:1 iPad program. We're starting slow with only the freshman class, so it will take us four years before we're totally 1:1. I've been tasked with helping get teachers ready for the flood of technology headed our way. One of the ways I've been doing this is through iTunes U courses for professional development. One of these is Flipping with an iPad.

I've been making videos to use with my students for years on my computer with Camtasia Mac using a Bluetooth Wacom tablet and Sankore for annotating on the screen. But these take me a while to make. A lot of this time is spent in the set up. I've been urging some teachers to lecture less in class and to use videos as replacements. I know lecture is not the best way to deliver content, but when starting a revolution we have to begin somewhere. So I decided to make a series of videos using only my iPad so I would have a much better idea of what was involved. I'll be adding all of my lessons learned to my iTunes U course. 

I'll call these videos Quickcasts, not because they're short, but because I want to make them quickly. The goal for a 5-10 min video will be no more than 20-30 min from set up to upload. This first one took a bit longer than that, but future ones will go much quicker. I learned a lot getting it together. Here's how I did it.

Equipment:

• iPad 2
• Notier Stylus
• Rode smartLav Microphone

Apps:

• Explain Everything $2.99
• Pinnacle Studio $12.99
• iMovie $4.99 (or free with new device)
• NodeBeat HD $2.99
• YouTube Capture Free

I used Explain Everything to capture all the video and screen writing. I used the Notier stylus for annotating and drawing. I've tried many styluses and this one works best for me. Over the years I've become more of an audio snob with my videos, so I have to have a microphone. I used the Rode smartLav. This was the first time I used it, so I still have a bit to learn about proper placement and such. My next video should sound better. On a side note, I've also played with the microphone built into my iPhone ear buds, I'm not sure how much better the Rode microphone is.

I also used Explain Everything to create the intro clip. It was too slow so I wanted to speed it up. Unfortunately iMovie on my iPad 2 could only slow down the video, not speed it up. I'm not sure if newer iPads can speed up video or not. So I took the clip into Pinnacle Studio to double the speed. I could have finished the video here, but I wanted to gain some experience with iMovie on my iPad, so I took the clip back to iMovie. All of our teachers already have iPads with iMovie.

The intro music was created in NodeBeat HD. This is a fun little app that I picked up a couple years ago while it was free. Moving audio around on an iPad can be problematic, but I was able to email the file to myself from NodeBeat and then import it to my project in iMovie. I could have used GarageBand to create the intro as well. Then I rendered the video to my camera roll and used YouTube Capture to upload. It is possible to upload directly from iMovie, but I also wanted the saved video file to drop into my iTunes U course anyway.

Next time I will position my microphone differently so the levels won't be too high. The intro clip with music is done so I'll just reuse it again. I may also spend a little more time prepping slides in Explain Everything so the video itself can be shorter. While nice at times, students don't need to watch me write every word on the screen in real time.

GeoGebra and iBooks?

If you follow my blog you know I'm a big fan of  the new iBooks and iBooks Author. What I wanted to mention today is a cool tool called GeoGebra.

"GeoGebra is free and multi-platform dynamic mathematics software for all levels of education that joins geometry, algebra, tables, graphing, statistics and calculus in one easy-to-use package. It has received several educational software awards in Europe and the USA."

 It's pretty cool. After playing with it a little I see some real potential here not only for math, but also science. Below is an interactive I made after playing for only a few minutes. It models a position time graph for an object moving with a constant velocity. You can change the Velocity or the Starting Position (xo).


It literally took me no more than ten minutes to make this having never worked with GeoGebra before. Anyway I was looking at GeoGebra as a way of creating interactive content for iBooks. Anthony DiLaura (@anthonydilaura) has been doing this already. He uses Tumult Hype to take GeoGebra output and get it into a widget for embedding in iBooks. I've come up with a slightly different way and easier way, but Anthony's way is better in some ways.

In order to put your GeoGebra Content into iBooks Author you must:

1. Download a Beta Version of GeoGebra (4.2 or 5.0) and create your interactive
2. File->Export as "Dynamic Worksheet as Webpage (html)"
3. Click on the "Export as Webpage" Button
4. Click on Advanced (near the center of the window)
5. Set width to 820 and height to 520
6. Place a checkmark in the Export to HTML5 box
7. Then Export. Save as index.html somewhere you can find it
8. Download my sample widget and unzip.
9. Replace my index.html with your index.html
10. Rename the sample folder to: your name.wdgt (Adding the wdgt will turn the folder into a widget file. You can access the individual files again by right clicking on the widget file and selecting "Show Package Contents")
11. Embed your widget in iBooks!

I should note one thing. This method will only work if you have an internet connection to the iPad when you're using it. I have been a bit daunted when it comes to making offline widgets. Check out this discussion forum if you want to try to create widgets for offline use.

There is a lot of potential in GeoGebra. Not just for me as an educator to make interactive elements for my students, but for my students to create them as well. I really wish I discovered this at the beginning of summer rather than the end...

Totally Awesome Video Abstracts!

This morning I sat down to reed Google Reader and I stumbled across a blog post by John Burk referencing a tweet by Andy Rundquist listing another blog post (I love social media). Anyway the gist of all that social cross-linking is the New Journal of Physics has just launched video abstracts for its articles! It does not look like authors are required to submit videos, but are strongly encouraged to.

So, why am I so excited by this? Well, two reasons really. The first is it gives me lots of ideas for what I can have students do to demonstrate mastery of concepts. Whether it's in my physics or electronics classes. Sure, people have been having students create video summaries/presentations of projects for years. But here are some real world scientists doing it. The ones I've watched are awesome. They can easily serve as a model for students to emulate.

The second reason for my excitement over this relates to the difficulty inherent in reading and understanding real research. I'm a physics teacher and I often have no idea what authors are saying in scholarly articles. So, how can I expect my students to really read and understand the primary literature? These videos offer a window of accessibility for non-physicists. There's a good chance that students will be able to get more out of the actual article when combined with the video. I'll definitely be trying this with my students.

One final thought. What if educational conferences had the expectation that presenters create short 3-5 min video abstract for their talks. How great would that be? I never know which sessions I want to catch. Often just 5 minutes in I realize I'm in the wrong room. It's not that the presenter is bad, it's just the 50 word abstract in the program was too short to really tell me what I needed to know. I think I'll propose the idea for the MACUL conference and create my abstract this afternoon (how come I can't just relax on a snow day?).



Cross-posted to FLOSScience.com

Podcasting on iTunesU

I applied and was invited to submit podcasts to the MI-Learning section of iTunesU. My main focus will be demos I use with my physics students. This way if they miss class when I do a demo they don't have to miss it completely.

Additionally I want to make sure my videos can be used by other educators who might not have all the right equipment to do demos or who might not know how to do them. I will be doing some videos intended to teach other teachers how to do various demos in class. Such as the Lasarium shown below.

You can find all of my Democasts at iTunesU, at Blip.tv, or the Archive.org.



Cross posted from FLOSScience

Physics Videos for Your Class

By now you've probably seen the Periodic Table of Videos produced by folks at the Univeristy of Nottingham. If youhaven't you really should check it out. But you may not have seen their Sixty Symbols videos.

In thier newest series they take sixty physics symbols/concepts and have created videos explaining what they are and what's cool about them. Below is the highlight reel. Check it out.

Cross posted from FLOSScience.com

Free Software for Video Analysis

Here's a quick video I slapped together for my students introducing Tracker. Tracker is a free program for doing video analysis from Open Source Physics. It's pretty powerful and runs in Java so it works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

It seems like it's more difficult than LoggerPro. With the increased difficulty comes some great potential. I'll be investigating this potential in future posts.



Cross posted from FLOSScience

Detroit Metro-Area Physics Teachers Meeting 2/3/09

The next meeting of the Detroit Metropolitan Area Physics Teachers will be Tuesday, Feb. 3rd. I will be hosting at Divine Child High School in Dearborn, MI. We'll get started with dinner (probably pizza) at 5:30 with presentations beginning around 6:30.

The focus this time will be technology in science education. If you read my blog at all you already know this is what I do for fun, so it goes without saying that I will have a lot to share. But, there will be others sharing as well. So far I know there will be presentation on:

• Vernier and Pasco sensors
• Video Analysis of motion (with LoggerPro and a Free way)
• Free Software for teaching sound
• Moodle
• Google Apps
• Searching for SuperNovae with small Telescopes
• Interactive Physics
• WiiMotes as accelerometers and Interactive White Boards
• Jeopardy PowerPoint game
• Podcasting
  
• Whatever else I can think of between now and then.

After the presentations I will have a number of stations set up to give people a chance to do some of what we've been talking about. I'm also planning on something new. I will set up a camera and broadcast a live stream to the web. Just goto dmapt.org for the live feed.

Below you'll find a series of previews I've been slapping together. They are done in one take and uploaded, so they're a bit rough, but they will give you an idea of what we're doing. Hopefully I'll get another one or two done over the weekend.

I hate Lecture

Last week I started my physics class with Relativity in Week One (pdf). A short unit by E.R. Huggins. I really like this unit, but it is totally contrary to how I usually teach as I had to lecture the whole week. This year I have four sections of Physics, in the past I've only had three. That extra section makes a big difference. My experience from last week reinforces my plans to not lecture in class this year.

So, this year I will be lecturing on video and students will be able to watch on their own time. This will leave more time in school for working problems. Basically, those tasks that may have been homework in the past will now be class work. So, when a student gets stuck they can ask me for help rather than just copying off a classmate. In addition, this may allow me to sneak in a few more labs.

The videos can be streamed from the web from either Blip.tv or the archive.org. They can also be downloaded via iTunes and played on home computers or portable media players. If needed, I will burn a small number of DVDs of my videos for students who might not have a computer at home.

So far I've been using TipCam to do screen captures and as needed I also use a small Wacom tablet I bought on ebay to write on the screen. I'll be listing all the videos on my FLOSScience site as I create them. Feel free to use them with your own classes or just use them as a source of inspiration.

In an effort to keep my life easy, my goal is to do my videos in one take. Basically, this means they will likely be a little rough at times. Below is the first part of my lecture from chapter 2 of our text book (modeling one dimensional uniform motion).

Physics is PHUN

I love physics simulations. I've recently found a free cross platform physics simulator. It is 2D only and is a little limited, but it's still fun. The program is called Phun. There are versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's definitely worth a look.

End of a Hiatus

Wow, I haven't blogged for over two months. How'd I let that happen? Not sure, but we'll see if I can avoid that in the future. Like all teachers this is the busy time for year, but I can't let that stop me from having a bit of fun.

I recently acquired a really cool high speed camera off a Toshiba America Foundation Grant. I'll be using it next year for a project centering on the physics of sports. As we close out this year though, we (the students and I) have been playing with it a bit. Below is an AP Chem student doing a cool (or I should say HOT) demo, filmed at 250 frames/second. DON'T TRY THIS ONE AT HOME. The whole video encompasses about 3/4 of a second in real time.


Find more videos like this on DC Physics

Astronomy is Cool

Last night I went to a meeting of the Detroit Metropolitan Area Physics Teachers (DMAPT), a group of local physics teachers who've been meeting for 50 years now. The meeting was at The Sherzer Observatory at Eastern Michigan University Unfortunately it was cloudy, so we didn't get to use the telescopes. However, if you're in SE Michigan the open it up to the public every clear Thursday night .

Anyway, Norb Vance demoed a cool, affordable planetarium that could easily be used in the classroom. Norb showed off the Sega HomeStar Pro. This $250 planetarium device can turn any flat ceiling into a night sky with 10,000 stars. Allowing students to get a better idea of what the night sky would look like if they could get away from the city.


A little searching found the even cheaper HomeStar Pure ($129). The major differences are that the Pro rotates the sky automatically while the Pure has manual rotation and it seems the brightness is different. The Pro says it has 3xLEDs while the Pure only lists one LED. I almost forgot, the Pro includes the ability to have a shooting star go by periodically.

So, is it better then Stellarium which you can get for free? I suppose it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Norb showed the night sky to great effect and also did a demo of what happens to the night sky with light pollution. Additionally, bu projecting the sky on the ceiling you get a better feel for actual star gazing then you get from a computer screen. That said, however, Stellarium is a totally cool program that I highly recommend.

Sketch Cast

I've recently been introduced to Sketchcast. I'm not going to bother trying to describe it. Here's a video I created using it.



The video details a lab we did in physics where students had to determine the height of an air rocket launch. Sketchcast is very easy to use and the video above only took a few minutes to produce. The only drawback is that you can't save your videos to your computer or bring them into a video editor as parts of larger projects. In the past I've done similar video lessons using my digital camera a pencil and paper. While its fairly easy to do this way Sketchcast is easier.

Social Networking in Physics

Last year I tried to start a class blog with Blogger and this didn't end up working out so well. Many students had trouble joining the blog and I kept forgetting to assign students to update it. So I ended up scrapping it. I really liked the idea, so this year I resurrected it as a social network rather than a simple blog.

I'm using Ning.com, which is a site you can use to set up your own social network on any topic. I'd give you a link to it, but it's set to private in-order to keep it to only my students and to allay any parent concerns about safety.

My Goals for Ning:

1. Engage the students more with the material.
   
2. Show students the power of Social Networking. Most of my students do some sort of social networking. Some may even know how to use it as a tool for learning. By the end of the year I hope all of my students will know how to do this.
3. Begin investigating online portfolios.
   

How Will I accomplish my Goals:

1. Engagement: Students today are online a lot. I want to leverage their interest in the internet and MySpace/Facebook. I'm hoping that by tying my class to a social network I may be able to excite them in ways I can't do in class.
2. Power: I will be encouraging them to share ideas and ask questions through the social network. We are building a community of learning here and we can only do that if they are helping each other. Every day a student (from each class) will post a summary of the notes/activities for the day. This should help while preparing for exams as well as aid those students who are absent.
   
3. Portfolios: Students can upload pictures and videos. I will be encouraging them to do this often. I'm not sure Ning is the right platform for a personal portfolio and I'm not sure I want to require a formal portfolio. That said, I will be asking students to document much of their work and to share that documentation through Ning.
   

I started the Ning page on March 13th, 2007 to see if I might be able to use it in my physics class. I invited the first students to participate on August 30th of the same year. Today is September 26th. The site has been up and running for just over three weeks. So far there have been no real problems.

Cool Stuff/observations tus far:

• On the first day (Aug. 30), while I was having students take my survey and begin setting up their Ning accounts there was a fun bit. During one class we all were so involved we did not notice what time it was. Suddenly the bell rang and there was an audible groan from the entire class. They were disappointed that they had to leave my class!!! Now I know they were just playing and we hadn't engaged with any physics material, but when they can associate fun with my class...
  
• A couple of students had questions related to a home-lab using trigonometry. They asked their questions in the comment section of my blog post. There was some discussion and questions were answered correctly before I ever saw them. I somehow missed the activity altogether until after the assignment was due. This is exactly the sort of activity I was hoping for.

Other Notes of Interest:

• Most of my students have already personalized their profile pages. They've changed the themes to match themselves. When I look at the profile pages in the other Ning networks I'm a member of (Clasroom2.0 and MACULSpace) I don't see this. Very few educators seem to have personalized their profile pages.
• Many students seem to use the comment section on the profile pages as a replacement for a chat client and/or text messaging. While setting up Ning access I had one student tell me he never uses email at all. When he wants to communicate with others online he uses MySpace.

Here's a quick video I put together for a faculty meeting to introduce this and another project I'm undertaking this year.

Click To Play

Free Physics Fun

There are lots of great physics simulations out there that are just plain fun to play with.

First up is Microsoft Physics Illustrator - Written at MIT this program allows you to create 2-D mechanical devices. It is a little limited, but it is fun to play with. The video below seems to be an early version. You can do everything you see in this video, but in some cases you do them a little differently. It was written for Tablet PC's but I've included a link for non-tablet users below. This looks like it would be great with a Smart Board. (mouse control isn't the greatest)

• How to use Physics Illustrator on Non Tablet PC's - Download links near the top.
• If you have a Tablet just go to Power Toys for Tablet PCs at Microsoft.
  

Line Rider - If you haven't played with this one yet you need to. I warn you however, that once you show it to your students they will play with it every time you turn your back. Basically you draw a hill and click run. A little guy riding a toboggan appears and sleds down your creation. Typically this doesn't turn out so well for the little guy. Some people have done some truly amazing stuff with this. You can use this to talk about conservation of energy and energy loss due to friction. I've also used it to talk about projectile motion and how roller coaster hills are shaped using this idea as well.


Sketchy Physics - This is a plugin for Google Sketch-Up. Sketch-Up is a program originally designed for architecture to create 3-D models. Someone has created a plugin that will allow you to give physics to your objects. It is really limited currently, but that doesn't mean it's not fun to play with. I've challenged my students to create a Rube Goldberg Machine using it, but none of them have taken me up on it yet.

PhET Simulations - You may also want to check out the PhET Simulations created by the University of Colorado. These are outstanding. For a more educational version of Line Rider you should check out the Energy Skate Park. It is outstanding. I may use this in class this year to test an idea. Eric Bergoust of the U.S. Olympic Ski Team wonders about holding a ski jumping competition on the Moon. With less gravity you should be able to soar higher and further. However, as any physics teacher would tell you, less gravity means you leave the jump at a lower speed. So, is there any benefit at all?

Michigan State Physics Standards:
Your mileage my vary, but these tools can be used to enhance instruction of the following standards (I'm sure I've missed some):

• P2.2g, P4.3B, P4.3C, P4.2C, P4.2e, P4.2f

Additionally, it would be quite easy to use these to design activities for inquiry. Let the kids play and then point out to them that they had to learn and experiment to get to where they are.

Screencasting Made Easy

I just discovered Jing while listening to the Geek!Ed! podcast today. Jing can be used for taking screen shots (I haven't tried this yet) or doing video screencasts. It is really easy to use and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. They have versions for Windows and Mac. It is currently free, but they may charge for it eventually. Videos are saved as *.swf files (flash video). You can view them in a browser locally or have them hosted at screencast.com

I'll definitely be playing with this more over the next few days. our science department is trying to get the students using their graphing calculators more. The problem is that I'm the only science teacher who knows how to use my calculator. So, I'm creating a series of tutorials for the other teachers. I'm using Virtual TI, a great (free) calculator emulator and capturing in Jing.

Below is the first in the series of tutorials. You can get all of the here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed to get them all and any I create in the future.

My Stuff from the NECC

Well, as of this morning my handouts still haven't appeared on the ISTE-NECC site for my session, so I've converted my pdf files to jpg and uploaded them to Picasa Web Albums (owned by Google).

Here are all the handouts I had posted to the backboard behind my table. I created them using Comic Life on my MacBook.

• Build your own probeware
• Sound Science
• Motion with a picket fence

I also have them as pdf files. If you'd like a copy of the pdfs just shoot me an email and I'll send them along (falconphysics@gmail.com)

You may also want to see my step by step instructions over on instructables.com

Me at the NECC

I've been hurriedly getting my stuff together for the upcoming NECC. I'd be doing great as far as time goes if it weren't for the fact that I'm also working with a team of students who are trying to finish their invention project. They won a Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams grant and will be presenting their project in Boston from June 19th thru the 23rd. I'll be going with them, which will be cool, but I'm running out of time!!!

Any way, on with my stuff. I've been uploading directions to Instructables.com. This site is pretty cool and they have a competition running right now where the best project wins a laser cutter. While I don't think I'll win the laser maybe they will send me a free T-Shirt. Although if I do somehow with the laser cutter the science club next year will have the best fund raisers ever.

Below you will find links to the projects I've submitted so far. I will have at least one or two more to put up yet before I'm ready for Atlanta.

• Make Your Own Light Probe/Photogate
• Determine the acceleration due to gravity
• Find the Speed of Sound
• Capture a sound and rebuild it with Audacity.

I've been contemplating ways I can use Instructables in class. I've used some of the projects either for demos or student projects, but I haven't had students upload their own yet. Their had been a problem with the Instructables web site and our network firewall, but this seems to have been resolved. Next year I'll have to use this. I just have to figure out a good way that won't swamp the site with 90 projects for the same thing.

Blip.tv - Video hosting

In the past I blogged about sites like YouTube being a Killer App for Education. Lately I've shifted to Blip.tv. I've done this for a couple of reasons.

The first is that many other educators have told me that YouTube is blocked in their building/district. There are now many different video hosting sites out there that work as well as or better than YouTube and I'll bet these haven't been blocked yet.

Another reason I like Blip is that when you upload a video to Blip you can have Blip upload it to the Internet Archive at the same time. You will need an Internet Archive username and password for this. (for more on how to upload videos to the Internet Archive, check out one of my previous posts)

My other reasons include: there is no 10 min limit for videos as on YouTube, the original source file is made available for download, there is not as much cross linking and recommendations making it less likely that students will be led to inappropriate videos.

This is the time of year when my seniors are gone and my juniors taking physics do astronomy projects using Photo Story. This year I've been posting them to Blip.tv. You can check out the ones I've uploaded so far at falconphysics.blip.tv. Unfortunately, the files created with PhotoStory use a video codec that Blip doesn't recognize (ironically, YouTube can convert these files), so they can't be converted into the typical flash video format. However, you can still view the original video files in *.wmv.

I've embedded one of my students videos below, but since it wasn't converted into flash video it might not display correctly in your web browser. (Note: The student narrating this does not have a British accent. He just decided to adopt one for comedy value)

Click To Play

Cool Astronomy Stuff

Well, it's that time of year again. My seniors have gone, but I still have juniors in my physics classes. We're spending the rest of our time (almost two weeks) learning a bit about the cosmos. This will culminate in an astronomy webquest (I blogged about it last year). Students will use Windows PhotoSotry to create a multimedia presentations where they investigate some aspect of modern astronomy.

I'm re-blogging this because I've discovered a couple cool new resources for teaching astronomy. Well, one is an old on, but it now works on my Intel based MacBook.

The newest version of Stellarium works great on my MacBook. Older versions weren't supported. Stellarium is a free program that will turn you computer into an interactive planetarium. It's lots of fun. When I was checking it out today I saw that Saturn will be right next to the moon tonight, I'll have to break out the binoculars and see if I can find it. This is a cross platform program and runs on Windows, MacOSX, and Linux.

The other resource I found is the website for the Hayden Planetarium. The site includes the typical schedules of programs offered, but it includes some really cool animations. The animations include things like colliding galaxies or the raging storm of Jupiter's Red Eye. They also have something called the Digital Universe Atlas. The Digital Atlas is a three dimensional map of the universe. You need to download a free piece of software in order to use the data. I've only just scratched the surface of this, but it looks like it could be incredibly useful.