Efofex News

This is one for the more technical of you. It will not affect most people, but those it does will find their lives are much easier.

Our products now support authenticated proxy servers. This will affect you if you have found that our products cannot connect and your school makes you type in credentials whenever a program wants to access the internet.

Previous versions of our products supported proxy servers but failed when authentication was required. This new feature should remove the last impediments to schools using the new cloud versions.

If you use our products as inserted objects in Word (the “old” way), the products are started and stopped every time you create a graphic. This means that credentials need to be supplied every time the program starts. Because of this, our products cache your credentials for 24 hours after you enter them. This will allow you use the products as interactively whilst still allowing for your school’s security settings.

If you have experienced connection issues in the past, our new versions will almost certainly correct them. They are certainly worth a download.

Hopefully you have not been one of those affected by the bug in a version of Microsoft Word but if you have been, there is some good news. Microsoft has now released a patch which customers have reported fully fixes the issue.

The Microsoft discussion of the whole incident is here.

The Microsoft discussion is here.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_win10/microsoft-equation-editor-30-equations-and/fc3359c4-01c8-4638-acf8-32ce03b690ed

And the link to the fix is here.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/3085439/april-12-2017-update-for-word-2016-kb3085439

We sometimes receive reports that FX Stat is “doing something wrong”. Often the problems are actually a symptom of a deeper issue – when is data discrete and when is it continuous?

Sometimes data is CLEARLY discrete in nature. Those cases are simple and we will not look at them.

Sometimes data is CLEARLY continuous and needs to be graphed appropriately. Again, this is easy.

Sometimes things are not so clear. For example here is some data that is not clearly discrete or continuous. Unfortunately, it is almost identical to the first data set! Certainly the histogram will be the same.

Is this data discrete? Should we graph it using a dot plot? Or is it “sort” of continuous so a histogram is fine?

Often the answer to these questions depends on the context of the data, but our products (obviously) have problems with context. On the whole, we do not get involved. If you decide to graph it as a dot plot or a histogram, our products will do as they are told.

The real problem comes with ogives. If you are thinking of this data as “discrete”, the ogive should look like this (we have put in the histogram so you can see what we mean.)

Many of you are probably saying “but that is wrong – it should look like the first graph”.

Well … it depends.

If you are intending the data to be discrete, then this ogive makes perfect sense – by the time you get to 16 (as opposed to 16.5), your cumulative frequency is 8. If you are thinking of this data as continuous then you need the first graph.

Unfortunately, we cannot tell what you are thinking or, sometimes more importantly, which school system you are teaching in. Different school systems have different “standards”.

We have taken the decision to make our products treat the data as entered. If you enter discrete values with a frequency we will always draw the second, offset ogive. If you really mean your data to be continuous and want to draw the ogive, you will need to enter your data as groups.

We are very happy to announce the release of our new-look website. Fresh, modern and much friendlier on mobile devices.

The new website also links to our new Knowledge Base which is where we are now consolidating all of the various information sources that you can use with your subscription.

Take a look at the new site today!

We have recently been working with OneNote and FX Draw on a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and what we have found is a combination of tools that has the potential to revolutionise the way you teach.

For years, teachers have used technology to centralise their teaching materials. When I first started teaching, most experienced mathematics teachers had multiple lever arch files above their desk that contained all of the materials they needed to teach their courses. Now most teachers collect electronic materials into folders on their computers. OneNote represents the next level of organisation as it allows you to organise disparate collections of materials into one “notebook”.

This screenshot shows one page of a OneNote notebook I am currently using to teach a pre-calculus level course. You can see the tabs across the top (1) for the topics and the pages (2) in the current topic. Also note where I have used the Surface’s pen to annotate the notes that I prepared earlier.

You can also use OneNote in full screen mode which makes it ideal for data projectors.

A major advantage of OneNote is that you can share your notebook with students in numerous ways. They can go home, visit a web page and see exactly the same thing that they were looking at in class.

The new FX Draw Cloud version allows you to dynamically create and insert editable diagrams into OneNote. It provides a dynamic mathematical drawing environment that will make you more productive and, with OneNote, far more organised.

While the ability to use a pen makes the Microsoft Surface (and similar tablet based computers) an ideal teaching tool, you can also use OneNote with FX Draw on any Mac or Windows computer. Obviously, you can also use FX Draw Cloud to produce graphics that can be used in ANY publication medium including Word, PowerPoint, Pages, Google Docs and Moodle (to name a few).