The Macbook makes its classroom debut

After a week of noodling around with the Macbook Pro, today I finally got around to using it for what I intend to use it for — working with students in the classroom. Well, I’ve actually been using it to that end for several days now, making materials up and getting presentations ready. But today the machine had its coming-out party, via an interactive lecture on eigenvalues and eigenvectors in Linear Algebra.

I’m perhaps making this out to be more than it was, which was just an ordinary use of technology in the classroom. I had a lecture in Power Point (yes, Microsoft Power Point; I couldn’t figure out how to insert mathematical notation into a Keynote presentation) and we jumped between it, the board, and a Maple session. So it was a pretty ordinary debut. But there were some interesting aspects I hadn’t expected:

• I wondered how the widescreen display would work when i plugged it in to a projector. Answer: When this happens, the screen resolution on the Macbook automatically compensates to match that of the projector. That was kind of neat, although I lost some screen real estate.
• Thank goodness for the Magsafe power connector. I had close quarters at the front of the room and lots of cables, and ended up tripping over the power cord to the Mac. Instead of flinging the machine to the ground, the power cord just popped right out.
• When you hit F7 during a Power Point presentation, it fades the projector screen to the desktop background image, but the Mac’s screen goes back to the desktop itself with any applications that might be open. In other words, it fades out what the students see but lets me see all the apps open on the machine and work behind the scenes without the students noticing.

I really do need to figure out, though, how to get math typesetting into Keynote. And is it just me, or does running Maple seem to slow everything down, even when nothing is going on in Maple?