Tag Archives: Wolfram Alpha

Introduction to the Wolfram Education Portal

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Guillermo Bautista | 1 Comment

Last year, I posted about Wolfram Alpha and the amazing computational document format developed by Wolfram Research. Recently, Wolfram Research has opened the Wolfram Education Portal, a site dedicated for storing and sharing dynamic teaching and learning materials. The portal contains free to use electronic textbooks in computational document format, lesson plans, widgets, and interactive Demonstrations. According to the website, a practice page with problem generators is currently being developed and will be online soon.

The website has several free sample teaching and learning materials but requires sign-up for full access.

The Wolfram Education Portal is currently in Beta, so I am not sure if the materials on the website will still be for free in the future.

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Posted in Resources and Freebies, Teaching Tools, Web 2.0 Technology

Tagged computational document format, Wolfram Alpha, wolfram demonstration, wolfram research

Wolfram launches computational document format

Posted on August 6, 2011 by Guillermo Bautista | 2 Comments

Wolfram, the maker of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha, has recently launched the computational document format (CDF) — a document format that allows authors to embed interactive diagrams, charts, and graphics in documents. The readers of CDF documents are allowed to change and adjust variables for exploration purposes.

The short video below introduces CDF.

Mathematica is required to create CDF documents, while the free CDF reader is needed to view them.

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Posted in Miscellaneous

Tagged cdf format, computational document format, mathematica, Wolfram Alpha

Some thoughts on using Wolfram Alpha in teaching math

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Guillermo Bautista | 2 Comments

My main work at our institute is to find ways on how to integrate technologyparticularly free software and Web 2.0 applications in teaching mathematics. Recently, I have been thinking of integrating Wolfram Alpha in teacher trainings, but I can’t yet justify to myself why (I don’t want to read the work of others yet).

Don’t get me wrong. Wolfram Alpha is a great tool – the first of its kind. You type your query and voila, all the related information pop up — graphs, numbers, tables, maps, and almost all the things that you need. Fantastic, but if a lesson ends in generating information from Wolfram Alpha, then it’s no different from using Google or Wikipedia — well a little different probably because of the presentation. I don’t want to let students use Wolfram Alpha just to get information; I want it to be a tool that would elicit thinking. Continue reading →