[K12OSN] Writing Math Equations

[Eric Brown]

I'm a math teacher, and I've tried a number of products.

Both MathType and OpenOffice's Math products work very very well, but
they're tedius if you have a bunch of equations to enter.

I REALLY like Scientific Notebook
(http://www.mackichan.com/index.html?products/snb.html~mainFrame). 
It's not quite as tedius as the other two.  It doesn't make as nicely
formatted documents as Word or Write, but it will do the math for you
like solve, simplify, or graph.  It's the math functions that make
this a very cool product.  You can graph in 2-d, 3-d, polar,
parametric, implicit.  It will solve exactly, give decimal
approximations, simplify.  It does algebra, statistics, calculus,
differential equations.  My first year of teaching, I got to teach a
calculus class that had no teacher's manual.  I made most of my tests
on Scientific Notebook to save time.  When I'm teaching the solving of
simultaneous systems of equations, I use it to quickly create graphs
of the systems.  The other biggest downside is the price. 
Manufacturer's price is $150 for academic pricing.  I bought mine back
in 95 and it still works great for me.

Mind you,  I don't know if any of these work on mac.  I tend to avoid them.

Eric

On 1/26/06, Bob McCaa <rmccaa at tiu11.org> wrote:
> Can you run Open Office.org2 on OsX?
>
> If so what about OO2's Math?
>
>
> On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 13:14 -0500, Gentgeen wrote:
> > On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:41:42 -0800
> > Huck <dhuckaby at paasda.org> wrote:
> >
> > > Latex
> > >
> > >
> > > David Trask wrote:
> > > > I have a teacher who wants to be able to write math equations that
> > > > set up properly...just like in a textbook...in other words fractions
> > > > show up as one number over another number instead of using forward
> > > > or back slashes.  Anyone know of a way to accomplish this?  Font,
> > > > program...web site?  She's using Mac OS X, but we're open to
> > > > anything.
> > > >
> > > > David N. Trask
> > > > Technology Teacher/Director
> > > > Vassalboro Community School
> > > > dtrask at vcsvikings.org
> > > > (207)923-3100
> > > >
> > > >
> >
> >
> > Latex is ideal, but probably not exactly "user friendly". Depending on
> > your user of course.
> >
> > What you end up using is really based on what you need as a final
> > product.  If your talking about just righting up the occasional test,
> > then OpenOffice and the Equation editor will do just fine.  (I
> > understand that AbiWord also has plug-in, but not familiar with it) In
> > OpenOffice, just go to "Insert - Object - Formula"
> >
> > Now if you are writing a book, the benefits of Latex would out weigh the
> > time it takes to learn.
> >
> > If you want something for a website, well that might be a bit harder.
> > You can do a kind of "Latex to PostScript to GIF file" kind of
> > conversion, or some other crazy thing to get the math stuff into a
> > graphics file.  There is also MathML (http://www.w3.org/Math/), but I am
> > not at all familiar with it, and not all browser's can handle it by
> > default.
> >
> > Being primarily a math teacher, I have looked into this 100 times over
> > the years.  I tend towards using OpenOffice most of the time.  But due
> > to necessary, I have found myself slowly learning Latex.
> >
>
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