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Monday, August 8, 2004 This is a new page to the MATH DITTOS 2 site and domain. It is intended to be a status report for MATH DITTOS 2: Fact Controlled MATH users. Development Notes - Next Release The next update/upgrade/revision of MD 2 products to be released will be Fact Controlled MULTIPLICATION 4.0. This update was pretty well finished up in December, 2003, before I discovered something I really didn't like about the appearance of the pages. So...I'm fixing what I didn't like and pulling things together for a release sometime in the spring of 2004. What's Happened to Fact Controlled DIVISION? Development on a division book/workbook stalled out when I chose to go with the K-3 learning disabled students when my K-6 LD classroom was split. The beta for registered users remains available, but new development is very, very slow. There are some major technical problems in creating both worksheets and especially the answer pages necessary. Other Development Plans Once I get FCM 4 out the door (or online), I plan to do a complete rewrite of Fact Controlled ADDITION & SUBTRACTION. There is also the possibility of something totally new, as I am now working with some much more severely disabled students than in the past. While we still make good use of both ADDITION & SUBTRACTION and MULTIPLICATION in my classroom, far more of my time is spent on counting skills, one-to-one correspondence and such. If you know this lingo, you know where I'm at! What About This Site? I've stewed for some time about whether to retire from teaching, close up the mathdittos2 domain, and just turn loose what was done in MD2 as freeware. Having recently committed to at least another year of teaching, I recently entered into a long-term agreement and renewal with my web host, HostingServices LLC. So, it would appear this site will remain here for some time and development and revision of the MATH DITTOS 2 series will continue. Why's It So Slow? First and foremost, I'm as lazy as the next person:-). Having finally gotten my professional life in order (I threatened to retire a year ago and was rewarded with incredible parental support that forced our school system to finally provide appropriate services to some of our disabled students.), I'm enjoying working some more reasonable hours these days. Beyond personal issues, there are some really nasty technical issues that have held back development of the series. I'd let the series languish a bit when I was so overwhelmed in the classroom for a number of years, but of course, the computer world went on. I found myself with a collection of raw files in the old, old ClarisWorks 4 and AppleWorks 5 format. With the advent of Mac OS X, some major changes were made in both the operating system and in AppleWorks. Simply stated, the changes wrought by Apple Computer mandate a nearly total rewrite of every page of the MATH DITTOS 2 series. Apple has consistently not done a very good job of preserving formatting when updating its word processor, AppleWorks. The old ClarisWorks 4 and 5 and AppleWorks 5 files lose much of their formatting when imported into AppleWorks 6! Apple also changed something called the leading in its fonts, causing pages to uncorrectably sprawl onto a second page. The upgrades have been a disaster to the MATH DITTOS 2 series. I've decided the only long-term answer is to go to another product for development of the basic pages. I've played a bit with Adobe's InDesign, but find I really don't like it very well! I also have a bit of experience with QuarkExpress. But both products, while usable, are terribly expensive. MD2 doesn't produce much revenue. So...to simply get updates out the door, I took an extra beige G3 Mac, loaded it up with a bunch of RAM and a processor upgrade, and have a separate drive running Mac OS 8.1 and AppleWorks 5 and Acrobat Pro 4 to create the basic files for now. It's a cumbersome process, and I really don't know how long it will work. Updated PDF files are transferred to my main Mac, another beige G3 tower that has been heavily upgraded, and assembled using Acrobat 5. This system works, but it sure gets confusing at times. And...what is lost is the ability to open up an AppleWorks file and customize it quickly for one of my students. And that was why the MD2 series was written...for my students. The shareware effort was an afterthought. So...there you have it for now. MD2 will continue to chug along. This site has been renewed for a number of years...so our address won't be changing anytime soon (or disappearing:-). |
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updated 3/9/2004 |
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